No More Learning

In fact, now
and then there is one who plays with us—beloved
Chance: he leads our hand occasionally, and even
the all-wisest Providence could not devise any finer
music than that of which our foolish hand is then
capable.
278.
The Thought of Death. —It gives me a melancholy
happiness to live in the midst of this confusion of
streets, of necessities, of voices: how much en-
joyment, impatience and desire, how much thirsty
life and drunkenness of life comes to light here
every moment! And yet it will soon be so still
for all these shouting, lively, life-loving people!
How everyone's shadow, his gloomy travelling-
companion stands behind him! It is always as in
the last moment before the departure of an emi-
grant-ship: people have more than ever to say to
one another, the hour • presses, the ocean with its
lonely silence waits impatiently behind all the
noise—so greedy, so certain of its prey! And all,
all, suppose that the past has been nothing, or a
small matter, that the near future is everything:
hence this haste, this crying, this self-deafening
and self-overreaching! Everyone wants to be
foremost in this future,—and yet death and the
stillness of death are the only things certain and
common to all in this future! How strange that this
sole thing that is certain and common to all,exercises
almost no influence on men, and that they are the
furthest from regarding themselves as the brother-
hood of death! It makes me happy to see that


## p. 216 (#288) ############################################

2l6 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
men do not want to think at all of the idea of death!
I would fain do something to make the idea of life
even a hundred times more worthy of their atten-
tion.
279.
Stellar Friendship. —We were friends, and have
become strangers to each other. But this is as it
ought to be, and we do not want either to conceal
or obscure the fact, as if we had to be ashamed of
it. We are two ships, each of which has its goal
and its course; we may, to be sure, cross one
another in our paths, and celebrate a feast together
as we did before,—and then the gallant ships lay
quietly in one harbour, and in one sunshine, so
that it might have been thought they were
already at their goal, and that they had had one
goal. But then the almighty strength of our tasks
forced us apart once more into different seas and
into different zones, and perhaps we shall never
see one another again,—or perhaps we may see
one another, but not know one another again; the
different seas and suns have altered us! That we
had to become strangers to one another is the law
to which we are subject: just by that shall we
become more sacred to one another! Just by
that shall the thought of our former friendship
become holier! There is probably some immense,
invisible curve and stellar orbit in which our
courses and goals, so widely different, may be
comprehended as small stages of the way,—let us
raise ourselves to this thought! But our life is
too short, and our power of vision too limited for


## p. 217 (#289) ############################################

SANCTUS JANUARIUS 217
us to be more than friends in the sense of that
sublime possibility. —And so we will believe in our
stellar friendship, though we should have to be
terrestrial enemies to one another.
280.
Architecture for Thinkers. —An insight is needed
(and that probably very soon) as to what is specially
lacking in our great cities—namely, quiet, spacious,
and widelyextended places for reflection, places with
long, lofty colonnades for bad weather, or for too
sunny days, where no noise of wagons or of shouters
would penetrate, and where a more refined propriety
would prohibit loud praying even to the priest:
buildings and situations which as a whole would
express the sublimity of self-communion and
seclusion from the world. The time is past when
the Church possessed the monopoly of reflection,
when the vita contemplativa had always in the first
place to be the vita religiosa: and everything that
the Church has built expresses this thought. I
know not how we could content ourselves with
their structures, even if they should be divested
of their ecclesiastical purposes: these structures
speak a far too pathetic and too biassed speech, as
houses of God and places of splendour for super-
natural intercourse, for us godless ones to be able
to think our thoughts in them. We want to have
ourselves translated into stone and plant, we want
to go for a walk in ourselves when we wander in
these halls and gardens.


## p. 218 (#290) ############################################

2l8 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
28l.
Knowing how to Find the End. —Masters of the
first rank are recognised by knowing in a perfect
manner how to find the end, in the whole as well
as in the part; be it the end of a melody or of a
thought, be it the fifth act of a tragedy or of a state
affair. The masters of the second degree always
become restless towards the end, and seldom dip
down into the sea with such proud, quiet equilibrium
as, for example, the mountain-ridge at Porto fino—
where the Bay of Genoa sings its melody to an end.
282.
The Gait. —There are mannerisms of the intellect
by which even great minds betray that they
originate from the populace, or from the semi-
populace :—it is principally the gait and step
of their thoughts which betray them; they cannot
walk. It was thus that even Napoleon, to his
profound chagrin, could not walk "legitimately"
and in princely fashion on occasions when it was
necessary to do so properly, as in great coronation
processions and on similar occasions: even there he
was always just the leader of a column—proud and
brusque at the same time, and very self-conscious
of it all. —It is something laughable to see those
writers who make the folding robes of their periods
rustle around them: they want to cover their feet.
283.
Pioneers. —I greet all the signs indicating that a
more manly and warlike age is commencing, which
will, above all, bring heroism again into honour I


## p. 219 (#291) ############################################

SANCTUS JANUARIUS 219
For it has to prepare the way for a yet higher age,
and gather the force which the latter will one day
require,—the age which will carry heroism into know-
ledge, and wage war for the sake of ideas and their
consequences. For that end many brave pioneers
are now needed, who, however, cannot originate out
of nothing,—and just as little out of the sand and
slime of present-day civilisation and the culture of
great cities: men silent, solitary and resolute, who
know how to be content and persistent in invisible
activity: men who with innate disposition seek in all
things that which is to be overcome in them: men to
whom cheerfulness, patience, simplicity, and con-
tempt of the great vanities belong just as much as
do magnanimity in victory and indulgence to the
trivial vanities of all the vanquished: men with
an acute and independent judgment regarding all
victors, and concerning the part which chance has
played in the winning of victory and fame: men
with their own holidays, their own work-days, and
their own periods of mourning; accustomed to
command with perfect assurance, and equally ready,
if need be, to obey, proud in the one case as in the
other, equally serving their own interests: men
more imperilled, more productive, more happy!
For believe me ! —the secret of realising the largest
productivity and the greatest enjoyment of existence
is to live in danger! Build your cities on the slope
of Vesuvius! Send your ships into unexplored
seas! Live in war with your equals and with
yourselves! Be robbers and spoilers, ye know-
ing ones, as long as ye cannot be rulers and
possessors | The time will soon pass when you


## p. 219 (#292) ############################################

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## p. 219 (#293) ############################################

SANCTUS JANUARIUS
221
: and no longer to seek, thou art opposed to any kind
of ultimate peace, thou desirest the eternal recur-
rence of war and peace :-man of renunciation,
wilt thou renounce in all these things? Who
will give thee the strength to do so ? No one has
yet had this strength! ”—There is a lake which one
day refused to flow away, and threw up a dam at
the place where it had hitherto flowed away: since
then this lake has always risen higher and higher.
Perhaps the very renunciation will also furnish us
with the strength with which the renunciation itself
can be borne; perhaps man will ever rise higher
and higher from that point onward, when he no
longer flows out into a God.
286.
A Digression. —Here are hopes; but what will
you see and hear of them, if you have not experi-
enced glance and glow and dawn of day in your
own souls? I can only suggest—I cannot do more!
To move the stones, to make animals men—would
you have me do that? Alas, if you are yet stones
and animals, seek first your Orpheus !
OM
287.
Love of Blindness. —"My thoughts,” said the
wanderer to his shadow, "ought to show me where
I stand, but they should not betray to me whither I
go. I love ignorance of the future, and do not
want to come to grief by impatience and antici-
patory tasting of promised things. ”


## p. 219 (#294) ############################################

224
THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
into the sublime. Much of the vague, which is
fuses to take form, has been reserved and uties
for the perspectives it is meant to give a !
of the remote and immeasurable. In the e
when the work has been completed, it is reveat
how it was the constraint of the same taste 3
organised and fashioned it in whole or in
whether the taste was good or bad is of
importance than one thinks,-it is sufficient
it was a taste ! —It will be the strong imperi
natures which experience their most refined
in such constraint, in such confinement and a
fection under their own law; the passion of the
violent volition lessens at the sight of all disciple
nature, all conquered and ministering nature:
when they have palaces to build and gardens ;
lay out, it is not to their taste to allow nature :
be free. —It is the reverse with weak characte
who have not power over themselves, and a
the restriction of style: they feel that if
repugnant constraint were laid upon them, they
would necessarily become vulgarised under :
they become slaves as soon as they serve, the
hate service. Such intellects—they may be inte
lects of the first rank—are always concerned
fashioning or interpreting themselves and the
surroundings as free nature—wild, arbitrary, far
tastic, confused and surprising : and it is wel 1
them to do so, because only in this manner and
they please themselves! For one thing is need
namely, that man should attain to satisfaction w
himself—be it but through this or that fable as
artifice: it is only then that man's aspect is at a


## p. 219 (#295) ############################################

SANCTUS JANUARIUS
225
indurable! He who is dissatisfied with himself is
ver ready to avenge himself on that account: we
thers will be his victims, if only in having always
199 o endure his ugly aspect. For the aspect of the
igly makes one mean and sad.
servers
291.
: Genoa. —I have looked upon this city, its villas
ind pleasure-grounds, and the wide circuit of its
Paramedic nhabited heights and slopes, for a considerable
** ime: in the end I must say that I see countenances
ere but of past generations,—this district is strewn with
the images of bold and autocratic men. They have
ar "lived and have wanted to live on—they say so
at the es with their houses, built and decorated for centuries,
ideas and not for the passing hour: they were well
to disposed to life, however ill-disposed they may
? 2st * soften have been towards themselves. I always see
Se the builder, how he casts his eye on all that is
tee the built around him far and near, and likewise on
thers is the city, the sea, and the chain of mountains; how
said she expresses power and conquest in his gaze:
all this he wishes to fit into his plan, and in the
in as trend make it his property, by its becoming a
beri portion of the same. The whole district is over-
1215 w grown with this superb, insatiable egoism of the
hemozit desire to possess and exploit; and as these men
do when abroad recognised no frontiers, and in their
ap: thirst for the new placed a new world beside the
sthiss old, so also at home everyone rose up against
To this everyone else, and devised some mode of expressing
out his superiority, and of placing between himself and
his neighbour his personal illimitableness. Everyone
's 2572
15


## p. 219 (#296) ############################################

214 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
hardest test. For now the thought of a personal
Providence first presents itself before us with
its most persuasive force, and has the best of
advocates, apparentness, in its favour, now when it
is obvious that all and everything that happens to
us always turns out for the best. The life of every
day and of every hour seems to be anxious for
nothing else but always to prove this proposition
anew; let it be what it will, bad or good weather,
the loss of a friend, a sickness, a calumny, the
non-receipt of a letter, the spraining of one's
foot, a glance into a shop-window, a counter-
argument, the opening of a book, a dream, a
deception :—it shows itself immediately, or very
soon afterwards as something "not permitted to
be absent,"—it is full of profound significance and
utility precisely for us! Is there a more dangerous
temptation to rid ourselves of the belief in the
Gods of Epicurus, those careless, unknown Gods,
and believe in some anxious and mean Divinity,
who knows personally every little hair on our
heads, and feels no disgust in rendering the most
wretched services? Well—I mean in spite of all
this! we want to leave the Gods alone (and the
serviceable genii likewise), and wish to content
ourselves with the assumption that our own
practical and theoretical skilfulness in explaining
and suitably arranging events has now reached its
highest point. We do not want either to think
too highly of this dexterity of our wisdom, when
the wonderful harmony which results from play-
ing on our instrument sometimes surprises us
too much: a harmony which sounds too well for


## p. 219 (#297) ############################################

SANCTUS JANUARIUS
227
all these good things will finally acquire a popu-
larity and a street-cry for themselves : but then
all the gold on them will also be worn off, and
more besides : all the gold in them will have
changed into lead. Truly, you understand the
reverse art of alchemy, the depreciating of the
most valuable things ! Try, just for once, another
recipe, in order not to realise as hitherto the
opposite of what you mean to attain: deny those
good things, withdraw from them the applause of
the populace and discourage the spread of them,
make them once more the concealed chastities of
solitary souls, say that morality is something for-
bidden! Perhaps you will thus win over for those
things the sort of men who are only of any ac-
count, I mean the heroic. But then there must be
something formidable in them, and not as hitherto
something disgusting! Might one not be in-
clined to say at present with reference to morality
what Master Eckardt says: “I pray God to deliver
me from God! "
293.
Our Atmosphere. —We know it well: to him who
only casts a glance now and then at science, as
in taking a walk (in the manner of women, and
alas! also like many artists), the strictness in its
service, its inexorability in small matters as well
as in great, its rapidity in weighing, judging and
condemning, produce something of a feeling of
giddiness and fright. It is especially terrifying to
him that the hardest is here demanded, that the
best is done without the reward of praise or dis-
tinction; it is rather as among soldiers-almost


## p. 219 (#298) ############################################

2l6 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
men do not want to think at all of the idea of death!
I would fain do something to make the idea of life
even a hundred times more worthy of their atten-
tion.
279.
Stellar Friendship. —We were friends, and have
become strangers to each other. But this is as it
ought to be, and we do not want either to conceal
or obscure the fact, as if we had to be ashamed of
it. We are two ships, each of which has its goal
and its course; we may, to be sure, cross one
another in our paths, and celebrate a feast together
as we did before,—and then the gallant ships lay
quietly in one harbour, and in one sunshine, so
that it might have been thought they were
already at their goal, and that they had had one
goal. But then the almighty strength of our tasks
forced us apart once more into different seas and
into different zones, and perhaps we shall never
see one another again,—or perhaps we may see
one another, but not know one another again; the
different seas and suns have altered us! That we
had to become strangers to one another is the law
to which we are subject: just by that shall we
become more sacred to one another! Just by
that shall the thought of our former friendship
become holier! There is probably some immense,
invisible curve and stellar orbit in which our
courses and goals, so widely different, may be
comprehended as small stages of the way,—let us
raise ourselves to this thought! But our life is
too short, and our power of vision too limited for


## p. 219 (#299) ############################################

SANCTUS JANUARIUS 217
us to be more than friends in the sense of that
sublime possibility. —And so we will believe in our
stellar friendship, though we should have to be
terrestrial enemies to one another.
280.
Architecture for Thinkers. —An insight is needed
(and that probably very soon) as to what is specially
lacking in our great cities—namely, quiet, spacious,
and widelyextended places for reflection, places with
long, lofty colonnades for bad weather, or for too
sunny days, where no noise of wagons or of shouters
would penetrate, and where a more refined propriety
would prohibit loud praying even to the priest:
buildings and situations which as a whole would
express the sublimity of self-communion and
seclusion from the world. The time is past when
the Church possessed the monopoly of reflection,
when the vita contemplativa had always in the first
place to be the vita religiosa: and everything that
the Church has built expresses this thought. I
know not how we could content ourselves with
their structures, even if they should be divested
of their ecclesiastical purposes: these structures
speak a far too pathetic and too biassed speech, as
houses of God and places of splendour for super-
natural intercourse, for us godless ones to be able
to think our thoughts in them. We want to have
ourselves translated into stone and plant, we want
to go for a walk in ourselves when we wander in
these halls and gardens.


## p. 219 (#300) ############################################

THE OFTL WISDOM, IV
characteristic behef of passion, the belief in ever-
lasting gurazion; I am to be envied for having
jound it and recognised it), and then it nourishes
me a: 2500 aně at eve, and spreads a profound
satisfaction around me and in me, so that I have
Do longing for anything else, not needing to
compare, or despise, or hate. But one day the
habt has had its time: the good thing separates
from me, not as something which then inspires
disgust is me—bat peaceably and as though satis.
bied with me, as I am with it; as if we had to be
mutually thankful, and thus shook hands for
farewe! ! And already the new habit waits at the
door, and similarly also my belief-indestructible
fool and sage that I am that this new habit will
be the right one, the ultimate right one. So it is
with me as regards foods, thoughts, men, cities,
poems, music, doctrines, arrangements of the day,
and modes of life. —On the other hand, I hate
permanent habits, and feel as if a tyrant came
into my neighbourhood, and as if my life's breath
condensed, when events take such a form that per-
manent habits seem necessarily to grow out of them:
for example, through an official position, through
constant companionship with the same persons,
through a settled abode, or through a uniform state
of health. Indeed, from the bottom of my soul I
am gratefully disposed to all my misery and sick-
ness, and to whatever is imperfect in me, because such
things leave me a hundred back-doors through which
I can escape from permanent habits. The most
unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible
thing, would be a life without habits, a life which


## p. 219 (#301) ############################################

SANCTUS JANUARIUS 2IO.
For it has to prepare the way for a yet higher age,
and gather the force which the latter will one day
require,—the age which will carry heroism into know-
ledge, and wage war for the sake of ideas and their
consequences. For that end many brave pioneers
are now needed, who, however, cannot originate out
of nothing,—and just as little out of the sand and
slime of present-day civilisation and the culture of
great cities: men silent, solitary and resolute, who
know how to be content and persistent in invisible
activity: men who with innate disposition seek in all
things that which is to be overcome in them: men to
whom cheerfulness, patience, simplicity, and con-
tempt of the great vanities belong just as much as
do magnanimity in victory and indulgence to the
trivial vanities of all the vanquished: men with
an acute and independent judgment regarding all
victors, and concerning the part which chance has
played in the winning of victory and fame: men
with their own holidays, their own work-days, and
their own periods of mourning; accustomed to
command with perfect assurance, and equally ready,
if need be, to obey, proud in the one case as in the
other, equally serving their own interests: men
more imperilled, more productive, more happy!
For believe me ! —the secret of realising the largest
productivity and the greatest enjoyment of existence
is to live in danger! Build your cities on the slope
of Vesuvius! Send your ships into unexplored
seas! Live in war with your equals and with
yourselves! Be robbers and spoilers, ye know-
ing ones, as long as ye cannot be rulers and
possessors! The time will soon pass when you


## p. 220 (#302) ############################################

232
THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
a “ fixed reputation," is regarded as dishonourable,
while the petrifaction of opinions has all the honour
to itself:-we have at present still to live under the
interdict of such rules! How difficult it is to live
when one feels that the judgment of many millen-
niams is around one and against one. It is prob-
able that for many millenniums knowledge was
a icted with a bad conscience, and that there must
have been much self-contempt and secret misery in
the history of the greatest intellects.
297-
Ability to Contradict. –Everyone knows at present
that the ability to endure contradiction is a high
indication of culture. Some people even know
that the higher man courts opposition, and provokes
it, so as to get a cue to his hitherto unknown parti.
ality. But the ability to contradict, the attainment
of gaud conscience in hostility to the accustomed,
the traditional and the hallowed,—that is more than
both the above-named abilities, and is the really
great, new and astonishing thing in our culture, the
step of all steps of the emancipated intellect : who
knoirs that? -
298.
A Sigh. —I caught this notion on the way, and
rapidly took the readiest, poor words to hold it fast,
so that it might not again fly away. And now it
has died in these dry words, and hangs and flaps
about in them—and I hardly know now, when I
look upon it, how I could have had such happiness
when I caught this bird.


## p. 221 (#303) ############################################

SANCTUS JANUARIUS
233
299.
What one should Learn from Artists. What
means have we for making things beautiful, at-
tractive, and desirable, when they are not so ? -
and I suppose they are never so in themselves !
We have here something to learn from physicians,
when, for example, they dilute what is bitter, or
put wine and sugar into their mixing-bowl; but we
have still more to learn from artists, who in fact,
are continually concerned in devising such in-
ventions and artifices. To withdraw from things
until one no longer sees much of them, until one
has even to see things into them, in order to see
them at all—or to view them from the side, and
as in a frame — or to place them so that they
partly disguise themselves and only permit of
perspective views—or to look at them through
coloured glasses, or in the light of the sunset-or
to furnish them with a surface or skin which is not
fully transparent: we should learn all that from
artists, and moreover be wiser than they. For
this fine power of theirs usually ceases with them
where art ceases and life begins; we, however, want
to be the poets of our life, and first of all in the
smallest and most commonplace matters.
300.
Prelude to Science. -Do you believe then that
the sciences would have arisen and grown up if
the sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers and witches
had not been their forerunners; those who, with
their promisings and foreshadowings, had first to


## p. 222 (#304) ############################################

222 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
288.
Lofty Moods. — It seems to me that most men do
not believe in lofty moods, unless it be for the
moment, or at the most for a quarter of an hour,—
except the few who know by experience a longer
duration of high feeling. But to be absolutely
a man with a single lofty feeling, the incarnation of
a single lofty mood—that has hitherto been only a
dream and an enchanting possibility: history does
not yet give us any trustworthy example of it.
Nevertheless it could some day produce such men
also—when a multitude of favourable conditions
have been created and established, which at
present even the happiest chance is unable to
throw together. Perhaps that very state which has
hitherto entered into our soul as an exception, felt
with horror now and then, may be the usual con-
dition of those future souls: a continuous movement
between high and low, and the feeling of high and
low, a constant state of mounting as on steps, and
at the same time reposing as on clouds.
289.
Aboard Ship ! —When one considers how a full
philosophical justification of his mode of living
and thinking operates upon every individual—
namely, as a warming, blessing, and fructifying
sun, specially shining on him; how it makes him
independent of praise and blame, self-sufficient,
rich and generous in the bestowal of happiness
and kindness; how it unceasingly transforms the
evil to the good, brings all the energies to bloom


## p. 223 (#305) ############################################

SANCTUS JANUARIUS 223
and maturity, and altogether hinders the growth
of the greater and lesser weeds of chagrin and dis-
content :—one at last cries out importunately: Oh,
that many such new suns were created! The evil
man, also, the unfortunate man, and the excep-
tional man, shall each have his philosophy, his
rights, and his sunshine! It is not sympathy with
them that is necessary! —we must unlearn this
arrogant fancy, notwithstanding that humanity
has so long learned it and used it exclusively—we
have not to set up any confessor, exorcist, or
pardoner for them! It is a new justice, however,
that is necessary!
And a new solution! And
new philosophers! The moral earth also is round!
The moral earth also has its antipodes! The anti-
podes also have their right to exist! there is
still another world to discover—and more than
one! Aboard ship! ye philosophers!
290.
One Thing is Needful. —To "give style" to one's u
character—that is a grand and a rare art! He
who surveys all that his nature presents in its
strength and in its weakness, and then fashions it
into an ingenious plan, until everything appears
artistic and rational, and even the weaknesses
enchant the eye—exercises that admirable art.
Here there has been a great amount of second
nature added, there a portion of first nature has
been taken away:—in both cases with long exer-
cise and daily labour at the task. Here the ugly,
which does not permit of being taken away, has
been concealed, there it has been re-interpreted


## p. 224 (#306) ############################################

224 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
into the sublime. Much of the vague, which re-
fuses to take form, has been reserved and utilised
for the perspectives :—it is meant to give a hint
of the remote and immeasurable. In the end,
when the work has been completed, it is revealed
how it was the constraint of the same taste that
organised and fashioned it in whole or in part:
whether the taste was good or bad is of less
importance than one thinks,—it is sufficient that
it was a taste! —It will be the strong imperious
natures which experience their most refined joy
in such constraint, in such confinement and per-
fection under their own law; the passion of their
violent volition lessens at the sight of all disciplined
nature, all conquered and ministering nature: even
when they have palaces to build and gardens to
lay out, it is not to their taste to allow nature to
be free. —It is the reverse with weak characters
who have not power over themselves, and hate
the restriction of style: they feel that if this
repugnant constraint were laid upon them, they
would necessarily become vulgarised under it:
they become slaves as soon as they serve, they
hate service. Such intellects—they may be intel-
lects of the first rank—are always concerned with
fashioning or interpreting themselves and their
surroundings as free nature—wild, arbitrary, fan-
tastic, confused and surprising: and it is well for
them to do so, because only in this manner can
they please themselves! For one thing is needful:
namely, that man should attain to satisfaction with
himself—be it but through this or that fable and
artifice: it is only then that man's aspect is at all


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SANCTUS JANUAlUUS 22$
endurable! He who is dissatisfied with himself is
ever ready to avenge himself on that account: we
others will be his victims, if only in having always
to endure his ugly aspect. For the aspect of the
ugly makes one mean and sad.
291.
Genoa. —I have looked upon this city, its villas
and pleasure-grounds, and the wide circuit of its
inhabited heights and slopes, for a considerable
time: in the end I must say that I see countenances
out of past generations,—this district is strewn with
the images of bold and autocratic men. They have
lived and have wanted to live on—they say so
with their houses, built and decorated for centuries,
and not for the passing hour: they were well
disposed to life, however ill-disposed they may
often have been towards themselves. I always see
the builder, how he casts his eye on all that is
built around him far and near, and likewise on
the city, the sea, and the chain of mountains; how
he expresses power and conquest in his gaze:
all this he wishes to fit into his plan, and in the
end make it his property, by its becoming a
portion of the same. The whole district is over-
grown with this superb, insatiable egoism of the
desire to possess and exploit; and as these men
when abroad recognised no frontiers, and in their
thirst for the new placed a new world beside the
old, so also at home everyone rose up against
everyone else, and devised some mode of expressing
his superiority, and of placing between himself and
his neighbour his personal illimitableness. Everyone
IS


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226 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
won for himself his home once more by over-
powering it with his architectural thoughts, and
by transforming it into a delightful sight for his
race. When we consider the mode of building
cities in the north, the law and the general delight
in legality and obedience, impose upon us: we
thereby divine the propensity to equality and
submission which must have ruled in those builders.
Here, however, on turning every corner you find
a man by himself, who knows the sea, knows ad-
venture, and knows the Orient, a man who is averse
to law and to neighbour, as if it bored him to
have to do with them, a man who scans all that
is already old and established, with envious glances:
with a wonderful craftiness of fantasy, he would
like, at least in thought, to establish all this anew,
to lay his hand upon it, and introduce his meaning
into it—if only for the passing hour of a sunny
afternoon, when for once his insatiable and melan-
choly soul feels satiety, and when only what is his
own, and nothing strange, may show itself to
his eye.
292.
To the Preachers of Morality. —I do not mean
to moralise, but to those who do, I would give this
advice: if you mean ultimately to deprive the best
things and the best conditions of all honour and
worth, continue to speak of them in the same
way as heretofore! Put them at the head of your
morality, and speak from morning till night of the
happiness of virtue, of repose of soul, of righteous-
ness, and of reward and punishment in the nature
of things: according as you go on in this manner,


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SANCTUS JANUARIUS 227
all these good things will finally acquire a popu-
larity and a street-cry for themselves: but then
all the gold on them will also be worn off, and
more besides: all the gold in them will have
changed into lead. Truly, you understand the
reverse art of alchemy, the depreciating of the
most valuable things! Try, just for once, another
recipe, in order not to realise as hitherto the
opposite of what you mean to attain: deny those
good things, withdraw from them the applause of
the populace and discourage the spread of them,
make them once more the concealed chastities of
solitary souls, say that morality is something for-
bidden! Perhaps you will thus win over for those
things the sort of men who are only of any ac-
count, I mean the heroic. But then there must be
something formidable in them, and not as hitherto
something disgusting! Might one not be in-
clined to say at present with reference to morality
what Master Eckardt says: '* I pray God to deliver
me from God! "
293-
Our Atmosphere. —We know it well: to him who
only casts a glance now and then at science, as
in taking a walk (in the manner of women, and
alas! also like many artists), the strictness in its
service, its inexorability in small matters as well
as in great, its rapidity in weighing, judging and
condemning, produce something of a feeling of
giddiness and fright. It is especially terrifying to
him that the hardest is here demanded, that the
best is done without the reward of praise or dis-
tinction; it is rather as among soldiers—almost


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228 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
nothing but blame and sharp reprimand is heard;
for doing well prevails here as the rule, doing ill
as the exception; the rule, however, has, here as
everywhere, a silent tongue. It is the same with
this "severity of science" as with the manners and
politeness of the best society: it frightens the
uninitiated. He, however, who is accustomed to it,
does not like to live anywhere but in this clear,
transparent, powerful, and highly electrified at-
mosphere, this manly atmosphere. Anywhere else
it is not pure and airy enough for him: he suspects
that there his best art would neither be properly
advantageous to anyone else, nor a delight to
himself, that through misunderstandings half of
his life would slip through his fingers, that much
foresight, much concealment, and reticence would
constantly be necessary,—nothing but great and
useless losses of power! In this keen and clear
element, however, he has his entire power: here he
can fly! Why should he again go down into those
muddy waters where he has to swim and wade and
soil his wings! —No! There it is too hard for us
to live! we cannot help it that we are born for the
atmosphere, the pure atmosphere, we rivals of the
ray of light; and that we should like best to ride
like it on the atoms of ether, not away from the
sun, but towards the sun! That, however, we
cannot do:—so we want to do the only thing that
is in our power: namely, to bring light to the earth,
we want to be " the light of the earth! " And for
that purpose we have our wings and our swiftness
and our severity, on that account we are manly, and
even terrible like the fire. Let those fear us, who


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SANCTUS JANUARIUS 229
do not know how to warm and brighten themselves
by our influence!
294.
Against the Disparagers of Nature. —They are
disagreeable to me, those men in whom every
natural inclination forthwith becomes a disease,
something disfiguring, or even disgraceful. They
have seduced us to the opinion that the inclinations
and impulses of men are evil; they are the cause
of our great injustice to our own nature, and to all
nature! There are enough of men who may yield
to their impulses gracefully and carelessly: but
they do not do so, for fear of that imaginary "evil
thing" in nature! That is the cause why there is
so little nobility to be found among men: the
indication of which will always be to have no fear
of oneself, to expect nothing disgraceful from
oneself, to fly without hesitation whithersoever we
are impelled—we free-born birds! Wherever we
come, there will always be freedom and sunshine
around us.
295.
Short-lived Habits. —I love short-lived habits,
and regard them as an invaluable means for
getting a knowledge of many things and various
conditions, to the very bottom of their sweetness
and bitterness; my nature is altogether arranged
for short-lived habits, even in the needs of its
bodily health, and in general, as far as I can see,
from the lowest up to the highest matters. I
always think that this will at last satisfy me
permanently (the short-lived habit has also that


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230 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
characteristic belief of passion, the belief in ever-
lasting duration; I am to be envied for having
found it and recognised it), and then it nourishes
me at noon and at eve, and spreads a profound
satisfaction around me and in me, so that I have
no longing for anything else, not needing to
compare, or despise, or hate. But one day the
habit has had its time: the good thing separates
from me, not as something which then inspires
disgust in me—but peaceably and as though satis-
fied with me, as I am with it; as if we had to be
mutually thankful, and thus shook hands for
farewell. And already the new habit waits at the
door, and similarly also my belief—indestructible
fool and sage that I am ! —that this new habit will
be the right one, the ultimate right one. So it is
with me as regards foods, thoughts, men, cities,
poems, music, doctrines, arrangements of the day,
and modes of life. —On the other hand, I hate
permanent habits, and feel as if a tyrant came
into my neighbourhood, and as if my life's breath
condensed, when events take such a form that per-
manent habits seem necessarily to grow out of them:
for example, through an official position, through
constant companionship with the same persons,
through a settled abode, or through a uniform state
of health. Indeed, from the bottom of my soul I
am gratefully disposed to all my misery and sick-
ness,and towhatever is imperfect in me, because such
things leave me a hundred back-doors through which
I can escape from permanent habits. The most
unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible
thing, would be a life without habits, a life which


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SANCTUS JANUARIUS 231
continually required improvisation : — that would
be my banishment and my Siberia.
296.
A Fixed Reputation. —A fixed reputation was
formerly a matter of the very greatest utility; and
wherever society continues to be ruled by the
herd - instinct, it is still most suitable for every
individual to give to his character and business
the appearance of unalterableness,—even when they
are not so in reality. "One can rely on him, he
remains the same"—that is the praise which has
most significance in all dangerous conditions of
society. Society feels with satisfaction that it
has a reliable tool ready at all times in the
virtue of this one, in the ambition of that one, and
in the reflection and passion of a third one,—it
honours this tool-like nature, this self-constancy,
this unchangeableness in opinions, efforts, and
even in faults, with the highest honours. Such
a valuation, which prevails and has prevailed
everywhere simultaneously with the morality of
custom, educates "characters," and brings all
changing, re-learning, and self-transforming into
disrepute. Be the advantage of this mode of
thinking ever so great otherwise, it is in any case
the mode of judging which is most injurious to
knowledge: for precisely the good-will of the know-
ing one ever to declare himself unhesitatingly as
opposed to his former opinions, and in general to
be distrustful of all that wants to be fixed in him
—is here condemned and brought into disrepute.
The disposition of the thinker, as incompatible with


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232 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
a " fixed reputation," is regarded as dishonourable,
while the petrifaction of opinions has all the honour
to itself:—we have at present still to live under the
interdict of such rules! How difficult it is to live
when one feels that the judgment of many millen-
niums is around one and against one. It is prob-
able that for many millenniums knowledge was
afflicted with a bad conscience, and that there must
have been much self-contempt and secret misery in
the history of the greatest intellects.
297.
Ability to Contradict. —Everyone knows at present
that the ability to endure contradiction is a high
indication of culture. Some people even know
that the higher man courts opposition, and provokes
it, so as to get a cue to his hitherto unknown parti-
ality. But the ability to contradict, the attainment
of good conscience in hostility to the accustomed,
the traditional and the hallowed,—that is more than
both the above-named abilities, and is the really
great, new and astonishing thing in our culture, the
step of all steps of the emancipated intellect: who
knows that ? —
298.
A Sigh. —I caught this notion on the way, and
rapidly took the readiest, poor words to hold it fast,
so that it might not again fly away. And now it
has died in these dry words, and hangs and flaps
about in them—and I hardly know now, when I
look upon it, how I could have had such happiness
when I caught this bird.


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SANCTUS JANUARIUS 233
299.
What one should Learn from Artists. —What
means have we for making things beautiful, at-
tractive, and desirable, when they are not so? —
and I suppose they are never so in themselves!
We have here something to learn from physicians,
when, for example, they dilute what is bitter, or
put wine and sugar into their mixing-bowl; but we
have still more to learn from artists, who in fact,
are continually concerned in devising such in-
ventions and artifices. To withdraw from things
until one no longer sees much of them, until one
has even to see things into them, in order to see
them at all—or to view them from the side, and
as in a frame"—or to place them so that they
partly disguise themselves and only permit of
perspective views—or to look at them through
coloured glasses, or in the light of the sunset—or
to furnish them with a surface or skin which is not
fully transparent: we should learn all that from
artists, and moreover be wiser than they. For
this fine power of theirs usually ceases with them
where art ceases and life begins; we, however, want
to be the poets of our life, and first of all in the
smallest and most commonplace matters.
300.
Prelude to Science. —Do you believe then that
the sciences would have arisen and grown up if
the sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers and witches
had not been their forerunners; those who, with
their promisings and foreshadowings, had first to


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234 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
create a thirst, a hunger, and a taste for hidden and
forbidden powers? Yea, that infinitely more had
to be promised than could ever be fulfilled, in order
that something might be fulfilled in the domain of
knowledge? Perhaps the whole of religion, also,
may appear to some distant age as an exercise and
a prelude, in like manner as the prelude and pre-
paration of science here exhibit themselves, though
not at all practised and regarded as such. Perhaps
religion may have been the peculiar means for
enabling individual men to enjoy but once the
entire self-satisfaction of a God and all his self-
redeeming power. Indeed ! —one may ask—would
man have learned at all to get on the tracks of
hunger and thirst for himself, and to extract satiety
and fullness out of himself, without that religious
schooling and preliminary history? Had Prome-
theus first to fancy that he had stolen the light, and
that he did penance for the theft,—in order finally
to discover that he had created the light, in that he
had longed for the light, and that not only man, but
also God had been the work of his hands and the
clay in his hands? All mere creations of the
creator? —just as the illusion, the theft, the Caucasus,
the vulture, and the whole tragic Prometheia of all
thinkers?
301.
Illusion of the Contemplative. —Higher men are
distinguished from lower, by seeing and hearing
immensely more, and in a thoughtful manner—and
it is precisely this that distinguishes man from
the animal, and the higher animal from the
lower. The world always becomes fuller for him


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SANCTUS JANUARIUS 235
who grows up into the full stature of humanity;
there are always more interesting fishing-hooks,
thrown out to him; the number of his stimuli is
continually on the increase, and similarly the
varieties of his pleasure and pain,—the higher man
becomes always at the same time happier and
unhappier. An illusion, however, is his constant
accompaniment all along: he thinks he is placed
as a spectator and auditor before the great
pantomime and concert of life; he calls his nature
a contemplative nature, and thereby overlooks the
fact that he himself is also a real creator, and
continuous poet of life,—that he no doubt differs
greatly from the actor in this drama, the so-called
practical man, but differs still more from a mere
onlooker or spectator before the stage. There is
certainly vis contemplativa, and re-examination of
his work peculiar to him as poet, but at the same
time, and first and foremost, he has the vis creativa,
which the practical man or doer lacks, whatever
appearance and current belief may say to the
contrary. It is we, we who think and feel,
that actually and unceasingly make something
which does not yet exist: the whole eternally
increasing world of valuations, colours, weights,
perspectives, gradations, affirmations and negations.
This composition of ours is continually learnt,
practised, and translated into flesh and actuality,
and even into the commonplace, by the so-called
practical men (our actors, as we have said). What-
ever has value in the present world, has it not in
itself, by its nature,—nature is always worthless :—
but a value was once given to it, bestowed upon it,


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236 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
and it was we who gave and bestowed! We only
have created the world which is of any account
to man ! —But it is precisely this knowledge that
we lack, and when we get hold of it for a moment
we have forgotten it the next: we misunderstand
our highest power, we contemplative men, and
estimate ourselves at too low a rate, — we are
neither as proud nor as happy as we might be.
302.
The Danger of the Happiest Ones. —To have fine
senses and a fine taste; to be accustomed to the
select and the intellectually best as our proper and
readiest fare; to be blessed with a strong, bold,
and daring soul; to go through life with a quiet
eye and a firm step, ever ready for the worst as for
a festival, and full of longing for undiscovered
worlds and seas, men and Gods; to listen to all
joyous music, as if there, perhaps, brave men,
soldiers and seafarers, took a brief repose and
enjoyment, and in the profoundest pleasure of the
moment were overcome with tears and the whole
purple melancholy of happiness: who would not
like all this to be his possession, his condition! It
was the happiness of Homer! The condition of
him who invented the Gods for the Greeks,—nay,
who invented his Gods for himself! But let us not
conceal the fact that with this happiness of Homer
in one's soul, one is more liable to suffering than
any other creature under the sun! And only at
this price do we purchase the most precious pearl
that the waves of existence have hitherto washed
ashore! As its possessor one always becomes more


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SANCTUS JANUARIUS 237
sensitive to pain, and at last too sensitive: a
little displeasure and loathing sufficed in the end
to make Homer disgusted with life. He was
unable to solve a foolish little riddle which some
young fishers proposed to him! Yes, the little
riddles are the dangers of the happiest ones ! —
303-
Two Happy Ones. —Certainly this man, notwith-
standing his youth, understands the improvisation
of life, and astonishes even the acutest observers.
For it seems that he never makes a mistake,
although he constantly plays the most hazardous
games. One is reminded of the improvising masters
of the musical art, to whom even the listeners
would fain ascribe a divine infallibility of the
hand, notwithstanding that they now and then
make a mistake, as every mortal is liable to do.
But they are skilled and inventive, and always
ready in a moment to arrange into the structure
of the score the most accidental tone (where the
jerk of a finger or a humour brings it about), and
to animate the accident with a fine meaning and
a soul. —Here is quite a different man: everything
that he intends and plans fails with him in the long
run. That on which he has now and again set his
heart has already brought him several times to the
abyss, and to the very verge of ruin; and if he has
as yet got out of the scrape, it certainly has not
been merely with a "black eye. " Do you think
he is unhappy over it? He resolved long ago
not to regard his own wishes and plans as of so
much importance. "If this does not succeed with


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238 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
me," he says to himself, "perhaps that will succeed;
and on the whole I do not know but that I am
under more obligation to thank my failures than
any of my successes. Am I made to be headstrong,
and to wear the bull's horns? That which con-
stitutes the worth and the sum of life for me, lies
somewhere else; I know more of life, because I
have been so often on the point of losing it; and
just on that account I have more of life than any
of you! "
304-
In Doing we Leave Undone. —In the main all
those moral systems are distasteful to me which say:
"Do not do this! Renounce! Overcome thyself! "
On the other hand I am favourable to those moral
systems which stimulate me to do something, and
to do it again from morning till evening, and dream
of it at night, and think of nothing else but to do
it well, as well as it is possible for me alone!
From him who so lives there fall off one after the
other the things that do not pertain to such a life:
without hatred or antipathy, he sees this take leave
of him to-day, and that to-morrow, like the yellow
leaves which every livelier breeze strips from the
tree: or he does not see at all that they take leave
of him, so firmly is his eye fixed upon his goal,
and generally forward, not sideways, backward,
nor downward. "Our doing must determine what
we leave undone; in that we do, we leave undone"
—so it pleases me, so runs my placitum. But I
do not mean to strive with open eyes for my
impoverishment; I do not like any of the negative


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SANCTUS JANUARIUS 239
virtues whose very essence is negation and self-
renunciation.
305-
Self-control. — Those moral teachers who first
and foremost order man to get himself into his
own power, induce thereby a curious infirmity in
him,—namely, a constant sensitiveness with refer-
ence to all natural strivings and inclinations, and
as it were, a sort of itching. Whatever may hence-
forth drive him, draw him, allure or impel him,
whether internally or externally—it always seems
to this sensitive being, as if his self-control were
in danger: he is no longer at liberty to trust
himself to any instinct, to any free flight, but
stands constantly with defensive mien, armed
against himself, with sharp distrustful eye, the
eternal watcher of his stronghold, to which office
he has appointed himself. Yes, he can be great in
that position! But how unendurable he has now
become to others, how difficult even for himself
to bear, how impoverished and cut off from the
finest accidents of his soul! Yea, even from all
further instruction! For we must be able to lose
ourselves at times, if we want to learn something
of what we have not in ourselves.
306.
Stoic and Epicurean. —The Epicurean selects the
situations, the persons, and even the events which
suit his extremely sensitive, intellectual constitu-
tion; he renounces the rest—that is to say, by far
the greater part of experience—because it would be


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240
THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
too strong and too heavy fare for him. The Stoic,
on the contrary, accustoms himself to swallow
stones and vermin, glass-splinters and scorpions,
without feeling any disgust: his stomach is meant
to become indifferent in the end to all that the
accidents of existence cast into it:-he reminds
one of the Arabic sect of the Assaua, with which
the French became acquainted in Algiers; and
like those insensible persons, he also likes well
to have an invited public at the exhibition of his
insensibility, the very thing the Epicurean willingly
dispenses with :-he has of course his "garden”!
Stoicism may be quite advisable for men with
whom fate improvises, for those who live in violent
times and are dependent on abrupt and change-
able individuals. He, however, who anticipates
that fate will permit him to spin "a long thread,”
does well to make his arrangements in Epicurean
fashion; all men devoted to intellectual labour
have done it hitherto! For it would be a supreme
loss to them to forfeit their fine sensibility, and
acquire the hard, stoical hide with hedgehog
prickles in exchange.
307.
In Favour of Criticism. --Something now appears
to thee as an error which thou formerly lovedst as
a truth, or as a probability: thou pushest it from
thee and imaginest that thy reason has there
gained a victory. But perhaps that error was
then, when thou wast still another person—thou
art always another person,—just as necessary to
thee as all thy present “ truths,” like a skin, as it


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SANCTUS JANUARIUS 239
virtues whose very essence is negation and self-
renunciation.
305-
Self-control. — Those moral teachers who first
and foremost order man to get himself into his
own power, induce thereby a curious infirmity in
him,—namely, a constant sensitiveness with refer-
ence to all natural strivings and inclinations, and
as it were, a sort of itching. Whatever may hence-
forth drive him, draw him, allure or impel him,
whether internally or externally—it always seems
to this sensitive being, as if his self-control were
in danger: he is no longer at liberty to trust
himself to any instinct, to any free flight, but
stands constantly with defensive mien, armed
against himself, with sharp distrustful eye, the
eternal watcher of his stronghold, to which office
he has appointed himself. Yes, he can be great in
that position! But how unendurable he has now
become to others, how difficult even for himself
to bear, how impoverished and cut off from the
finest accidents of his soul! Yea, even from all
further instruction! For we must be able to lose
ourselves at times, if we want to learn something
of what we have not in ourselves.
306.
Stoic and Epicurean. —The Epicurean selects the
situations, the persons, and even the events which
suit his extremely sensitive, intellectual constitu-
tion; he renounces the rest—that is to say, by far
the greater part of experience—because it would be


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240 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, IV
too strong and too heavy fare for him. The Stoic,
on the contrary, accustoms himself to swallow
stones and vermin, glass-splinters and scorpions,
without feeling any disgust: his stomach is meant
to become indifferent in the end to all that the
accidents of existence cast into it:—he reminds
one of the Arabic sect of the Assaua, with which
the French became acquainted in Algiers; and
like those insensible persons, he also likes well
to have an invited public at the exhibition of his
insensibility, the very thing the Epicurean willingly
dispenses with :—he has of course his "garden "!
Stoicism may be quite advisable for men with
whom fate improvises, for those who live in violent
times and are dependent on abrupt and change-
able individuals. He, however, who anticipates
that fate will permit him to spin " a long thread,"
does well to make his arrangements in Epicurean
fashion; all men devoted to intellectual labour
have done it hitherto!