I have often asked myself whether I am not much more deeply indebted to the hardest years of my life than to any others. According to the voice of my innermost nature, everything necessary, seen from above and in the light of a _superior_ economy, is also useful in itself--not only should one bear it, one should _love_ it.... _Amor fati:_ this is the very core of my being.--And as to my prolonged illness, do I not owe much more to it than I owe to my health? To it I owe a _higher_ kind of health, a sort of health which grows stronger under everything that does not actually kill it!--_To it, I owe even my philosophy...._ Only great suffering is the ultimate emancipator of spirit; for it teaches one that _vast suspiciousness_ which makes an X out of every U, a genuine and proper X, _i.e.,_ the antepenultimate letter: Only great suffering; that great suffering, under which we seem to be over a fire of greenwood, the suffering that takes its time--forces us philosophers to descend into our nethermost depths, and to let go of all trustfulness, all good-nature, all whittling-down, all mildness, all mediocrity,--on which things we had formerly staked our humanity. I doubt whether such suffering improves a man; but I know that it makes him _deeper...._ Supposing we learn to set our pride, our scorn, our strength of will against it, and thus resemble the Indian who, however cruelly he may be tortured, considers himself revenged on his tormentor by the bitterness of his own tongue. Supposing we withdraw from pain into nonentity, into the deaf, dumb, and rigid sphere of self-surrender, self-forgetfulness, self-effacement: one is another person when one leaves these protracted and dangerous exercises in the art of self-mastery; one has one note of interrogation the more, and above all one has the will henceforward to ask more, deeper, sterner, harder, more wicked, and more silent questions, than anyone has ever asked on earth before.... Trust in life has vanished; life itself has become a _problem._ --But let no one think that one has therefore become a spirit of gloom or a blind owl! Even love of life is still possible,--but it is a _different kind_ of love.... It is the love for a woman whom we doubt.... 2. The rarest of all things is this: to have after all another taste--a _second_ taste. Out of such abysses, out of the abyss of _great suspicion_ as well, a man returns as though born again, he has a new skin, he is more susceptible, more full of wickedness; he has a finer taste for joyfulness; he has a more sensitive tongue for all good things; his senses are more cheerful; he has acquired a second, more dangerous, innocence in gladness; he is more childish too, and a hundred times more cunning than ever he had been before.