193. Quidquid luce fuit, tenebris agit: but also contrariwise. What we
experience in dreams, provided we experience it often, pertains at
last just as much to the general belongings of our soul as anything
"actually" experienced; by virtue thereof we are richer or poorer, we
have a requirement more or less, and finally, in broad daylight, and
even in the brightest moments of our waking life, we are ruled to some
extent by the nature of our dreams. Supposing that someone has often
flown in his dreams, and that at last, as soon as he dreams, he is
conscious of the power and art of flying as his privilege and his
peculiarly enviable happiness; such a person, who believes that on the
slightest impulse, he can actualize all sorts of curves and angles, who
knows the sensation of a certain divine levity, an "upwards"
without effort or constraint, a "downwards" without descending
or lowering--without TROUBLE!--how could the man with such
dream-experiences and dream-habits fail to find "happiness" differently
coloured and defined, even in his waking hours! How could he fail--to
long DIFFERENTLY for happiness? "Flight," such as is described by poets,
must, when compared with his own "flying," be far too earthly, muscular,
violent, far too "troublesome" for him.
194. The difference among men does not manifest itself only in the
difference of their lists of desirable things--in their regarding
different good things as worth striving for, and being disagreed as to
the greater or less value, the order of rank, of the commonly recognized
desirable things:--it manifests itself much more in what they regard as
actually HAVING and POSSESSING a desirable thing. As regards a woman,
for instance, the control over her body and her sexual gratification
serves as an amply sufficient sign of ownership and possession to the
more modest man; another with a more suspicious and ambitious thirst for
possession, sees the "questionableness," the mere apparentness of such
ownership, and wishes to have finer tests in order to know especially
whether the woman not only gives herself to him, but also gives up for
his sake what she has or would like to have--only THEN does he look upon
her as "possessed." A third, however, has not even here got to the limit
of his distrust and his desire for possession: he asks himself whether
the woman, when she gives up everything for him, does not perhaps do
so for a phantom of him; he wishes first to be thoroughly, indeed,
profoundly well known; in order to be loved at all he ventures to let
himself be found out. Only then does he feel the beloved one fully in
his possession, when she no longer deceives herself about him, when
she loves him just as much for the sake of his devilry and concealed
insatiability, as for his goodness, patience, and spirituality. One
man would like to possess a nation, and he finds all the higher arts of
Cagliostro and Catalina suitable for his purpose. Another, with a more
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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