Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra

THIRD PART. 56. LVI. OLD AND NEW TABLES. (continued)

Verily, like penitential preachers and fools did I cry wrath and shame on all their greatness and smallness. Oh, that their best is so very small! Oh, that their worst is so very small! Thus did I laugh.

Thus did my wise longing, born in the mountains, cry and laugh in me; a wild wisdom, verily!--my great pinion-rustling longing.

And oft did it carry me off and up and away and in the midst of laughter; then flew I quivering like an arrow with sun-intoxicated rapture:

--Out into distant futures, which no dream hath yet seen, into warmer souths than ever sculptor conceived,--where gods in their dancing are ashamed of all clothes:

(That I may speak in parables and halt and stammer like the poets: and verily I am ashamed that I have still to be a poet!)

Where all becoming seemed to me dancing of Gods, and wantoning of Gods, and the world unloosed and unbridled and fleeing back to itself:--

--As an eternal self-fleeing and re-seeking of one another of many Gods, as the blessed self-contradicting, recommuning, and refraternising with one another of many Gods:--

Where all time seemed to me a blessed mockery of moments, where necessity was freedom itself, which played happily with the goad of freedom:--

Where I also found again mine old devil and arch-enemy, the spirit of gravity, and all that it created: constraint, law, necessity and consequence and purpose and will and good and evil:--

For must there not be that which is danced OVER, danced beyond? Must there not, for the sake of the nimble, the nimblest,--be moles and clumsy dwarfs?--

3.

There was it also where I picked up from the path the word "Superman," and that man is something that must be surpassed.