On a thousand bridges and piers shall they throng to the future, and
always shall there be more war and inequality among them: thus doth my
great love make me speak!
Inventors of figures and phantoms shall they be in their hostilities;
and with those figures and phantoms shall they yet fight with each other
the supreme fight!
Good and evil, and rich and poor, and high and low, and all names of
values: weapons shall they be, and sounding signs, that life must again
and again surpass itself!
Aloft will it build itself with columns and stairs—life itself: into
remote distances would it gaze, and out towards blissful beauties—
THEREFORE doth it require elevation!
And because it requireth elevation, therefore doth it require steps, and
variance of steps and climbers! To rise striveth life, and in rising to
surpass itself.
And just behold, my friends! Here where the tarantula’s den is, riseth
aloft an ancient temple’s ruins—just behold it with enlightened eyes!
Verily, he who here towered aloft his thoughts in stone, knew as well as
the wisest ones about the secret of life!
That there is struggle and inequality even in beauty, and war for power
and supremacy: that doth he here teach us in the plainest parable.
How divinely do vault and arch here contrast in the struggle: how with
light and shade they strive against each other, the divinely striving
ones.—
Thus, steadfast and beautiful, let us also be enemies, my friends!
Divinely will we strive AGAINST one another!—
Alas! There hath the tarantula bit me myself, mine old enemy! Divinely
steadfast and beautiful, it hath bit me on the finger!
“Punishment must there be, and justice”—so thinketh it: “not
gratuitously shall he here sing songs in honour of enmity!”
Yea, it hath revenged itself! And alas! now will it make my soul also
dizzy with revenge!
That I may NOT turn dizzy, however, bind me fast, my friends, to this
pillar! Rather will I be a pillar-saint than a whirl of vengeance!
Verily, no cyclone or whirlwind is Zarathustra: and if he be a dancer,
he is not at all a tarantula-dancer!—
Thus spake Zarathustra.
XXX. THE FAMOUS WISE ONES.
The people have ye served and the people’s superstition—NOT the
truth!—all ye famous wise ones! And just on that account did they pay
you reverence.
And on that account also did they tolerate your unbelief, because it
was a pleasantry and a by-path for the people. Thus doth the master give
free scope to his slaves, and even enjoyeth their presumptuousness.
But he who is hated by the people, as the wolf by the dogs—is the free
spirit, the enemy of fetters, the non-adorer, the dweller in the woods.
To hunt him out of his lair—that was always called “sense of right” by
the people: on him do they still hound their sharpest-toothed dogs.
“For there the truth is, where the people are! Woe, woe to the seeking
ones!”—thus hath it echoed through all time.