Death our will even, our freedom—this is life’s highest meaning! Who but Nietzsche could have thought that? Of course, this is not to throw life away, when it has become hard and heavy to bear. Such a death would be of all the most unfree. It would be a flight, not a deed; it would be a lamentation and a feebleness, not a festival of the soul! But it means that we take up death from the start into the order of our life, as the night which, no less than the day, belongs to man’s full day. It means that we give to life a worth which no death can destroy, which first in death reveals its eternal power. I must die—so laments the slave, who has lived only non-entities even in his life, and has never learned that life is work, creation, consummation. I _will_ die—so speaks the hero, to whom every fight brings the prize of a victory well worth death!—the hero who hazards his life every moment for the highest human good, who knows that he and his life have become a sacrifice from which a better, higher, freer humanity shall gain its life and its strength. Who is ugly? Who is beautiful? Who is ashamed of his death and falsifies his deadness that it may look like life—who does this, bears death within himself as a power that drags him down, disfigures him in the fullness of that which he would be able to live. But who, in his power to die, proves that he has learned to live, has overcome the ugliest thing in man, cast it out; namely, the fear of death which creates all the lies of life, and all the servility and unfreedom of men—which creates men over whom _das Gewesen_! the dead past, possesses power, so that they can never breathe a joyous breath, can never commit themselves to the living and the growing. But a _beautiful_ culture will also become a _good_ culture because one that is living is at once good and beautiful; the eternal life of God, of whom it is said: There is none good but God alone. Emasculating Ibsen[2]