Zarathustra loves the brave. But not the bravery that takes up every challenge. There is often more bravery in holding back and passing by and reserving one's self for a worthier foe. Zarathustra does not teach: Ye shall love your enemies, but: Ye shall not engage in combat with enemies ye despise. Why so hard? men cry to Zarathustra. He replies: Why so hard, once said the charcoal to the diamond; are we not near of kin? The creators are hard. Their blessedness it is to press their hand upon future centuries as upon wax. No doctrine revolts Zarathustra more than that of the vanity and senselessness of life. This is in his eyes ancient babbling, old wives' babbling. And the pessimists who sum up life with a balance of aversion, and assert the badness of existence, are the objects of his positive loathing. He prefers pain to annihilation. The same extravagant love of life is expressed in the _Hymn to Life_, written by his friend, Lou von Salomé, which Nietzsche set for chorus and orchestra. We read here-- "So truly loves a friend his friend As I love thee, O Life in myst'ry hidden! If joy or grief to me thou send; If loud I laugh or else to weep am bidden, Yet love I thee with all thy changeful faces; And should'st thou doom me to depart, So would I tear myself from thy embraces, As comrade from a comrade's heart." And the poem concludes-- "And if thou hast now left no bliss to crown me. Lead on I thou hast thy sorrow still!"[8] When Achilles chose to be a day-labourer on earth rather than a king in the realm of the shades, the expression was a weak one in comparison with this passionate outburst, which paradoxically thirsts even for the cup of pain. Eduard von Hartmann believes in a beginning and end of the "world process." He concludes that no eternity can lie behind us; otherwise everything possible must already have happened, which--according to his contention--is not the case. In sharp contrast to him, on this point as on others, Zarathustra teaches, with, be it said, a somewhat shallow mysticism--which is derived from the ancient Pythagoreans' idea of the circular course of history and is influenced by Cohelet's Hebrew philosophy of life--the eternal recurrence; that is to say, that all things eternally return and we ourselves with them, that we have already existed an infinite number of times and all things with us. The great clock of the universe is to him an hour-glass, which is constantly turned and runs out again and again. This is the direct antithesis of Hartmann's doctrine of universal destruction, and curiously enough it was put forward at about the same time by two French thinkers: by Blanqui in _L'Éternité par les Astres_ (1871), and by Gustave Le Bon in _L'Homme et les Sociétés_ (1881). At his death Zarathustra will say: Now I disappear and die; in a moment I shall be nothing, for the soul is mortal as the body; but the complex of causes in which I am involved will return, and it will continually reproduce me.