Is it possible that this despair is not the final state in the
exhaustion of a race, but only a transition from belief in a perfect and
ethical world to an attitude of transvaluation and control?[219] Perhaps
we are at the bottom of our spiritual toboggan, and an ascending
movement is around the corner of the years. Now that our Christian
bubble has burst into Schopenhauer, we are left free to recover some
part of the joyous strength of the ancients. Let us become again as
little children, unspoiled by religion and morality; let us forget what
it is to feel sinful; let the thousandfold laughter of children clear
the air of the odor of decay. Let us begin anew; and the soul will rise
and overflow all its margins with the joy of rediscovered life.[220]
Life has not deceived us! On the contrary, from year to year it appears
richer, more desirable, and more mysterious; the old fetters are broken
by the thought that life may be an experiment and not a duty, not a
fatality, not a deceit![221] Life--that means for us to transform
constantly into light and flame all that we are, and also all that we
meet with; we cannot possibly do otherwise.[222] To be natural again, to
dare to be as immoral as nature is; to be such pagans as were the Greeks
of the Homeric age, to say Yea to life, even to its suffering; to win
back some of that mountain-air Dionysian spirit which took pleasure in
the tragic, nay, which invented tragedy as the expression of its
super-abundant vitality, as the expression of its welcome of even the
cruelest and most terrible elements of life![223] To be healthy once
more!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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