Bad: thus doth it call all that is spirit-broken, and sordidly-servile—constrained, blinking eyes, depressed hearts, and the false submissive style, which kisseth with broad cowardly lips. And spurious wisdom: so doth it call all the wit that slaves, and hoary-headed and weary ones affect; and especially all the cunning, spurious-witted, curious-witted foolishness of priests! The spurious wise, however, all the priests, the world-weary, and those whose souls are of feminine and servile nature—oh, how hath their game all along abused selfishness! And precisely THAT was to be virtue and was to be called virtue—to abuse selfishness! And “selfless”—so did they wish themselves with good reason, all those world-weary cowards and cross-spiders! But to all those cometh now the day, the change, the sword of judgment, THE GREAT NOONTIDE: then shall many things be revealed! And he who proclaimeth the EGO wholesome and holy, and selfishness blessed, verily, he, the prognosticator, speaketh also what he knoweth: “BEHOLD, IT COMETH, IT IS NIGH, THE GREAT NOONTIDE!” Thus spake Zarathustra. LV. THE SPIRIT OF GRAVITY. 1. My mouthpiece—is of the people: too coarsely and cordially do I talk for Angora rabbits. And still stranger soundeth my word unto all ink-fish and pen-foxes. My hand—is a fool’s hand: woe unto all tables and walls, and whatever hath room for fool’s sketching, fool’s scrawling! My foot—is a horse-foot; therewith do I trample and trot over stick and stone, in the fields up and down, and am bedevilled with delight in all fast racing. My stomach—is surely an eagle’s stomach? For it preferreth lamb’s flesh. Certainly it is a bird’s stomach. Nourished with innocent things, and with few, ready and impatient to fly, to fly away—that is now my nature: why should there not be something of bird-nature therein! And especially that I am hostile to the spirit of gravity, that is bird-nature:—verily, deadly hostile, supremely hostile, originally hostile! Oh, whither hath my hostility not flown and misflown! Thereof could I sing a song—and WILL sing it: though I be alone in an empty house, and must sing it to mine own ears. Other singers are there, to be sure, to whom only the full house maketh the voice soft, the hand eloquent, the eye expressive, the heart wakeful:—those do I not resemble.— 2. He who one day teacheth men to fly will have shifted all landmarks; to him will all landmarks themselves fly into the air; the earth will he christen anew—as “the light body.” The ostrich runneth faster than the fastest horse, but it also thrusteth its head heavily into the heavy earth: thus is it with the man who cannot yet fly. Heavy unto him are earth and life, and so WILLETH the spirit of gravity! But he who would become light, and be a bird, must love himself:—thus do _I_ teach. Not, to be sure, with the love of the sick and infected, for with them stinketh even self-love!