The Dawn of Day · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
460.
UTILISING OUR HOURS OF DANGER.—Those men and conditions whose every movement may mean danger to our possessions, honour, and life or death, and to those most dear to us, we shall naturally learn to know thoroughly. Tiberius, for instance, must have meditated much more deeply on the character and methods of government of the Emperor Augustus, and must have known far more about them than even the wisest historian. At the present day we all live, relatively speaking, in a security which is much too great to make us true psychologists: some survey their fellow-men as a hobby, others out of ennui, and others again merely from habit; but never to the extent they would do if they were told “Discern or perish!” As long as truths do not cut us to the quick we assume an attitude of contempt towards them: they still appear to us too much like the “winged dreams,” as if we could or could not have them at our discretion, as if we could likewise be aroused from these truths as from a dream! _HIC RHODUS, HIC SALTA._—Our music, which can and must change into everything, because like the demon of the sea, it has no character of its own: this music in former times devoted its attention to the Christian savant, and transposed his ideals into sounds: why cannot it likewise find those brighter, more cheerful, and universal sounds which correspond to the ideal thinker?—a music which could rock itself at ease in the vast floating vaults of the soul? So far our music has been so great and so good; nothing seemed impossible to its powers. May it therefore prove possible to create these three sensations at one time: sublimity, deep and warm light, and rapture of the greatest possible consistency!
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.