On the Blissful Islands

The figs are falling from the trees, they are good and sweet; and as they fall, their red skin splits. I am a north wind to ripe figs.

Thus, like figs, these teachings fall to you, my friends: now drink their juice and their sweet flesh! It is autumn all around, and clear sky, and afternoon.

Look, what fullness is around us! And out of the overflow it is beautiful to gaze out upon distant seas.

Once people said God when they gazed upon distant seas; but now I have taught you to say: Übermensch.

God is a conjecture; but I want your conjecturing to reach no further than your creating will.

Could you create a god?—Then be silent to me about all gods! But you could well create the Übermensch.

Not you yourselves, perhaps, my brothers! But you could re-create yourselves into fathers and forefathers of the Übermensch: and let this be your best creating!—

God is a conjecture: but I want your conjecturing to be bounded by what can be thought.

Could you think a god?—But let this mean will to truth to you: that everything be transformed into what is humanly thinkable, humanly visible, humanly feelable! You shall think your own senses through to the end!

And what you called world, that shall first be created by you: it shall itself become your reason, your image, your will, your love! And truly, for your bliss, you knowers!

And how would you bear life without this hope, you knowers? You were not meant to be born into the incomprehensible, nor into the irrational.

But so that I may reveal my heart to you entirely, you friends: if there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods.

I drew the conclusion, it is true; but now it draws me.—

God is a conjecture: but who could drink all the torment of this conjecture without dying? Shall the creator be robbed of his faith, and the eagle of his soaring in eagle-distances?

God is a thought that makes all that is straight crooked, and all that stands turn and spin. What? Time would be gone, and all that is perishable only a lie?

To think this is whirling and dizziness for human bones, and vomiting for the stomach besides: truly, the spinning sickness I call it, to conjecture such a thing.

Evil I call it, and hostile to humanity: all this teaching of the One and the Full and the Unmoved and the Sated and the Imperishable!

“All that is imperishable”—that is only a parable!¹ And the poets lie too much.—

But the best parables shall speak of time and becoming: a praise they shall be, and a justification of all that is perishable!

Creating—that is the great redemption from suffering, and life’s growing lighter. But for the creator to be, that itself requires suffering, and much transformation.

Yes, much bitter dying must be in your life, you creators! Thus you are advocates and justifiers of all that is perishable.

For the creator himself to be the child that is newly born, he must also want to be the one giving birth, and the pain of the one giving birth.

Truly, through a hundred souls I went my way, and through a hundred cradles and birth pangs. Many a farewell have I taken already; I know the heartbreaking last hours.

But so my creating will, my destiny, wills it. Or, to say it to you more honestly: just such a destiny—my will wills.

All that feels suffers in me and is in prisons: but my willing always comes to me as my liberator and bringer of joy.

Willing liberates: that is the true teaching of will and freedom—thus Zarathustra teaches it to you.

No-longer-willing and no-longer-esteeming and no-longer-creating! ah, may this great weariness always stay far from me!

In knowing, too, I feel only my will’s joy in begetting and becoming; and if there is innocence in my knowledge, this is so because will to begetting is in it.

Away from God and gods this will lured me; for what would there be to create if gods—existed!

But to the human being it drives me ever anew, my ardent will to create; so the hammer is driven toward the stone.

Ah, you human beings, in the stone there sleeps an image for me, the image of my images! Ah, that it must sleep in the hardest, ugliest stone!

Now my hammer rages cruelly against its prison. Pieces fly from the stone like dust: what is that to me?

I want to complete it: for a shadow came to me—the stillest and lightest of all things once came to me!

The beauty of the Übermensch came to me as a shadow. Ah, my brothers! What are the gods—to me any longer!—

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Notes

1. 1. The closing chorus of Goethe’s Faust, Part Two, begins: “All that is perishable is only a parable.” Zarathustra turns the line around.