Zarathustra Rocks !
This is my 3rd time reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friederich Nietzsche.
The first time I was a wannabee-Nihilist lefty art student in my 20’s and I liked it right away – but didn’t read it all, nor did I read too carefully.
The second time I read T.S.Z. was about 4 years later. That time I read it as it deserves to be read: in a cave in a desert canyon with nearby views across vast arid zones, after hitch-hiking the western U.S. for many months alone.
This time, the third time, I read it as a tired, tax-paying citizen of a failing republic with a wife and family. I found so many pearls of wisdom in this crazy text. Surely one can also find fault with it and note pathetic aspects in it… but upon this reading I encountered the wellsprings of poetry; along with mockery of poetic self-pity. I found crazy humor, delusions of cosmic grandeur, venomous resentment, psychotic pride, peaceful humility, transcendent wit, and similar precious things that make life a nightmarish delight. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a great read – for none and all …
And I LOVE IT MORE THAN EVER !!!!!
PS: I think Kaufmann translation is the best.
Holy Wordcraft
Our Lord was dazed from the red –
then raised from the dead.
Faith dies in the room – only to rise in the doom.
Taught… captured: they roll the stone away.
Caught… raptured. (He stole their own away.)
Tempt ye the womb? Empty the tomb !
Zarathustra’s Welcome
Why does he not come who has so long announced himself ? ask many.
Has solitude swallowed him up?
Or are we perhaps supposed to come to him?
Now it happens that solitude itself grows weary and breaks, like a tomb that breaks and can no longer hold its dead. Everywhere one sees the resurrected. Now the waves are climbing and climbing around your mountain, 0 Zarathustra. And however high your height may be, many must come up to you: your bark shall not be stranded much longer. And that we who were despairing have now come to your cave and no longer despair – that is but a sign and symbol that those better than we are on their way to you; for this is what is on its way to you: the last remnant of God among men that is, all the men of great longing, of great nausea. of great disgust, all who do not want to live unless they learn to hope again, unless they learn from you, 0 Zarathustra, the great hope.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: The Welcome, Part IV
Walter Kaufmann translation from evankozierachi.com
