The conditions under which any one understands me, and _necessarily_ understands me--I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops--and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as _beneath_ him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him.... He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the _forbidden_; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. _And_ the will to economize in the grand manner--to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm.... Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self.... Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers foreordained: of what account are the _rest_?--The rest are merely humanity.--One must make one's self superior to humanity, in power, in _loftiness_ of soul,--in contempt. FRIEDRICH W. NIETZSCHE. THE ANTICHRIST 1. --Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans--we know well enough how remote our place is. "Neither by land nor by water will you find the road to the Hyperboreans": even Pindar,[1] in his day, knew _that_ much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond _death_--_our_ life, _our_ happiness.... We have discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who _else_ has found it?--The man of today?--"I don't know either the way out or the way in; I am whatever doesn't know either the way out or the way in"--so sighs the man of today.... _This_ is the sort of modernity that made us ill,--we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and _largeur_ of the heart that "forgives" everything because it "understands" everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such south-winds!... We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding out _where_ to direct our courage. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. _Our_ fate--it was the fulness, the tension, the _storing up_ of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happiness of the weakling, from "resignation"... There was thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast--_for we had not yet found the way_. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a _goal_....