Such folk sit down unto dinner and bring nothing with them, not even a good hunger. And now they backbite: "All is vanity!" But to eat well and drink well, O my brethren, is, verily, no vain art! Break, break the tables of those who are never joyful!(25) (23) Goethe's _Faust_, II, ll. 1940-1. Bayard Taylor translates: _Encheiresin naturae_, this Chemistry names, nor knows how herself she banters and blames! (24) "Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 120. (25) _Ibid._, p. 296, sec. 13. The Will to Live holds man's one chance of this-worldly bliss, and supersedes any care for the remote felicities of any problematic future state. Yet the Nietzschean cult of life is not to be understood by any means as a banal devotion to the pleasurable side of life alone. The true disciple finds in every event, be it happy or adverse, exalting or crushing, the factors of supreme spiritual satisfaction: joy and pain are equally implied in experience, the Will to Live encompasses jointly the capacity to enjoy and to suffer. It may even be paradoxically said that since man owes some of his greatest and most beautiful achievements to sorrow, it must be a joy and a blessing to suffer. The unmistakable sign of heroism is _amor fati_, a fierce delight in one's destiny, hold what it may. Consequently, the precursor of the superman will be possessed, along with his great sensibility to pleasure, of a capacious aptitude for suffering. "Ye would perchance abolish suffering," exclaims Nietzsche, "and we,--it seems that we would rather have it even greater and worse than it has ever been. The discipline of suffering,--tragical suffering,--know ye not that only this discipline has heretofore brought about every elevation of man?" "Spirit is that life which cutteth into life. By one's own pain one's own knowledge increaseth;--knew ye that before? And the happiness of the spirit is this: to be anointed and consecrated by tears as a sacrificial animal;--knew ye that before?" And if, then, the tragical pain inherent in life be no argument against Joyfulness, the zest of living can be obscured by nothing save the fear of total extinction. To the disciple of Nietzsche, by whom every moment of his existence is realized as a priceless gift, the thought of his irrevocable separation from all things is unbearable. "'Was this life?' I shall say to Death. 'Well, then, once more!'" And--to paraphrase Nietzsche's own simile--the insatiable witness of the great tragi-comedy, spectator and participant at once, being loath to leave the theatre, and eager for a repetition of the performance, shouts his endless _encore_, praying fervently that in the constant repetition of the performance not a single detail of the action be omitted. The yearning for the endlessness not of life at large, not of life on any terms, but of _this my life_ with its ineffable wealth of rapturous moments, works up the extreme optimism of Nietzsche to its stupendous _a