On the Sublime Ones
Still is the floor of my sea: who would guess that it hides playful monsters!
Unshakable is my depth: but it glitters with swimming riddles and laughter.
A sublime one I saw today, a solemn one, a penitent of the spirit: oh, how my soul laughed at his ugliness!
With his chest thrust out, and like those who draw in their breath: thus he stood there, the sublime one, and silent:
Hung with ugly truths, his spoils of the hunt, and rich in torn clothes; many thorns, too, hung on him—but as yet I saw no rose.
He has not yet learned laughter and beauty. Gloomy, this hunter came back from the forest of knowledge.
From a fight with wild animals he came home: but out of his seriousness there still looks a wild animal too—one not overcome!
Like a tiger he still stands there, wanting to spring; but I do not like these tense souls, my taste is unfriendly to all these withdrawn ones.
And you tell me, friends, that there is no disputing about taste and tasting? But all life is a dispute about taste and tasting!
Taste: that is at once weight and scale and the one who weighs; and woe to all that lives that would want to live without dispute about weight and scale and the one who weighs!
If he grew weary of his sublimity, this sublime one: only then would his beauty begin—and only then will I taste him and find him to my taste.
And only when he turns away from himself will he leap over his own shadow—and, truly! into his sun.
All too long he sat in the shadow, the cheeks of the penitent of the spirit grew pale; he almost starved on his expectations.
Contempt is still in his eye; and disgust hides at his mouth. He is resting now, to be sure, but his rest has not yet lain down in the sun.
He should do as the bull does; and his happiness should smell of earth and not of contempt for the earth.
As a white bull I would like to see him, snorting and bellowing as he goes before the plowshare: and even his bellowing should praise all that is earthly!
Dark still is his face; the shadow of the hand plays upon it. The sense of his eye is still overshadowed.
His deed itself is still the shadow upon him: the hand darkens the doer. He has not yet overcome his deed.
I love the bull’s neck in him, it is true: but now I want to see the angel’s eye as well.
His hero’s will too he must still unlearn: an uplifted one he shall be to me, and not merely a sublime one:—the ether itself should lift him, the will-less one!
He subdued monsters, he solved riddles: but he should also redeem his monsters and riddles, he should yet transform them into heavenly children.
His knowledge has not yet learned to smile and to be without jealousy; his streaming passion has not yet grown still in beauty.
Truly, not in satiety shall his longing fall silent and sink under, but in beauty! Grace belongs to the generosity of the great-minded.
His arm laid over his head: thus should the hero rest, thus should he overcome even his resting.
But precisely to the hero the beautiful is the hardest of all things. The beautiful cannot be won by any violent will.
A little more, a little less: precisely this is much here, this is the most here.
To stand with relaxed muscles and with unharnessed will: that is the hardest for all of you, you sublime ones!
When power becomes gracious and comes down into the visible: beauty I call such coming down.
And from no one do I want beauty as much as from you, you mighty one: let your goodness be your last self-conquest.
All evil I believe you capable of: therefore I want the good from you.
Truly, I have often laughed at the weaklings who think themselves good because they have lame paws!
You shall strive after the virtue of the pillar: it grows ever more beautiful and more delicate, but inwardly harder and better able to bear weight, the higher it rises.
Yes, you sublime one, one day you shall yet be beautiful and hold up the mirror to your own beauty.
Then your soul will shudder with divine desires; and there will be worship even in your vanity!
For this is the secret of the soul: only when the hero has abandoned her does there approach her, in a dream—the overhero.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.