On the Great Longing
O my soul, I taught you to say “today” as you say “once” and “formerly,” and to dance your round dance over every Here and There and Yonder.
O my soul, I redeemed you from all corners, I swept dust, spiders, and twilight off you.
O my soul, I washed the petty shame and the corner-virtue off you and persuaded you to stand naked before the eyes of the sun.
With the storm that is called “spirit” I blew over your surging sea; I blew all clouds away, I strangled even the strangler that is called “sin.”
O my soul, I gave you the right to say No like the storm and to say Yes as the open sky says Yes: still as light you stand, and now you walk through denying storms.
O my soul, I gave you back freedom over the created and the uncreated: and who knows, as you know it, the lust of what is to come?
O my soul, I taught you the despising that does not come like the gnawing of worms, the great, the loving despising, which loves most where it despises most.
O my soul, I taught you to persuade so that you persuade the very grounds to come to you: like the sun, which persuades even the sea to rise to its height.
O my soul, I took from you all obeying, knee-bending, and saying “Lord”; I gave you yourself the name “turning of need” and “destiny.”
O my soul, I gave you new names and many-colored playthings, I called you “destiny” and “circumference of circumferences” and “umbilical cord of time” and “azure bell.”
O my soul, I gave your soil all wisdom to drink, all new wines and also all the immemorially old, strong wines of wisdom.
O my soul, every sun I poured upon you, and every night and every silence and every longing:—then you grew up for me like a vine.
O my soul, overrich and heavy you stand there now, a vine with swelling udders and crowded brown golden grapes:—
—crowded and pressed by your happiness, waiting out of superabundance and still bashful about your waiting.
O my soul, there is now nowhere a soul that would be more loving and more embracing and more comprehensive! Where would future and past be closer together than with you?
O my soul, I have given you everything, and all my hands have become empty for you:—and now! Now you say to me, smiling and full of melancholy: “Which of us has to give thanks?—
“—does the giver not have to thank the receiver for receiving? Is bestowing not a need? Is taking not—mercy?”—
O my soul, I understand the smile of your melancholy: your overabundance itself now stretches out longing hands!
Your fullness looks out over roaring seas and seeks and waits; the longing of overfullness looks out of the smiling sky of your eyes!
And truly, O my soul! Who could see your smile and not melt into tears? The angels themselves melt into tears at the overgoodness of your smile.
It is your goodness and overgoodness that does not want to lament and weep: and yet, O my soul, your smile longs for tears and your trembling mouth for sobs.
“Is not all weeping a lamenting? And all lamenting an accusing?” Thus you speak to yourself, and that is why, O my soul, you would rather smile than pour out your suffering.
—pour out in streaming tears all your suffering over your fullness and over all the vine’s urgent craving for the vintager and the vintager’s knife!
But if you will not weep, not weep out your purple melancholy, then you will have to sing, O my soul!—Behold, I smile myself, I who foretell this to you:
—sing, with roaring song, until all seas grow still to listen to your longing—
—until over still, longing seas the boat floats, the golden marvel, around whose gold all good, bad, marvelous things leap:—
—and many animals great and small, and everything that has light, marvelous feet, so that it can run on violet-blue paths—
—toward the golden marvel, the voluntary boat, and toward its master: but he is the vintager, who waits with a diamond vintager’s knife—
—your great deliverer, O my soul, the nameless one—for whom only future songs will find names! And truly, your breath already smells of future songs—
—already you glow and dream, already you drink thirstily at all deep, resounding wells of comfort, already your melancholy rests in the bliss of future songs!—
O my soul, now I have given you everything, and even my last, and all my hands have become empty for you:—that I bade you sing, behold, that was my last!
That I bade you sing, speak now, speak: which of us now has—to give thanks?—But better still: sing to me, sing, O my soul! And let me give thanks!—
Thus spoke Zarathustra.