Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra

FOURTH AND LAST PART. 79. LXXIX. THE DRUNKEN SONG. (continued)

--Of drunken midnight-death happiness, which singeth: the world is deep, AND DEEPER THAN THE DAY COULD READ!

7.

Leave me alone! Leave me alone! I am too pure for thee. Touch me not! Hath not my world just now become perfect?

My skin is too pure for thy hands. Leave me alone, thou dull, doltish, stupid day! Is not the midnight brighter?

The purest are to be masters of the world, the least known, the strongest, the midnight-souls, who are brighter and deeper than any day.

O day, thou gropest for me? Thou feelest for my happiness? For thee am I rich, lonesome, a treasure-pit, a gold chamber?

O world, thou wantest ME? Am I worldly for thee? Am I spiritual for thee? Am I divine for thee? But day and world, ye are too coarse,--

--Have cleverer hands, grasp after deeper happiness, after deeper unhappiness, grasp after some God; grasp not after me:

--Mine unhappiness, my happiness is deep, thou strange day, but yet am I no God, no God's-hell: DEEP IS ITS WOE.

8.

God's woe is deeper, thou strange world! Grasp at God's woe, not at me! What am I! A drunken sweet lyre,--

--A midnight-lyre, a bell-frog, which no one understandeth, but which MUST speak before deaf ones, ye higher men! For ye do not understand me!

Gone! Gone! O youth! O noontide! O afternoon! Now have come evening and night and midnight,--the dog howleth, the wind:

--Is the wind not a dog? It whineth, it barketh, it howleth. Ah! Ah! how she sigheth! how she laugheth, how she wheezeth and panteth, the midnight!