Ecce Homo Complete Works, Volume Seventeen · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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Such things have never been written, never been felt, never been _suffered:_ only a God, only Dionysus suffers in this way. The reply to such a dithyramb on the sun's solitude in light would be Ariadne. ... Who knows, but I, who Ariadne is! To all such riddles no one heretofore had ever found an answer; I doubt even whether any one had ever seen a riddle here. One day Zarathustra severely determines his life-task--and it is also mine. Let no one misunderstand its meaning. It's a yea-saying to the point of justifying, to the point of redeeming even all that is past. "I walk among men as among fragments of the future: of that future which I see. "And all my creativeness and effort is but this, that I may be able to think and recast all these fragments and riddles and dismal accidents into one piece. "And how could I bear to be a man, if man were not also a poet, a riddle reader, and a redeemer of chance! "To redeem all the past, and to transform every 'it was' into 'thus would I have it'--that alone would be my salvation!" In another passage he defines as strictly as possible what to him alone "man" can be,--not a subject for love nor yet for pity--Zarathustra became master even of his loathing of man: man is to him a thing unshaped, raw material, an ugly stone that needs the sculptor's chisel.
"No longer to will, no longer to value, no longer to create! Oh, that this great weariness may never be mine! "Even in the lust of knowledge, I feel only the joy of my will to beget and to grow; and if there be innocence in my knowledge, it is because my procreative will is in it. "Away from God and gods did this will lure me: what would there be to create if there were gods? "But to man doth it ever drive me anew, my burning, creative will. Thus driveth it the hammer to the stone. "Alas, ye men, within the stone there sleepeth an image for me, the image of all my dreams! Alas, that it should have to sleep in the hardest and ugliest stone! "_Now rageth my hammer ruthlessly against its prison._ From the stone the fragments fly: what's that to me? "I will finish it: for a shadow came unto me--the stillest and lightest thing on earth once came unto me! "The beauty of the Superman came unto me as a shadow. Alas, my brethren! What are the--gods to me now?" Let me call attention to one last point of view. The line in italics is my pretext for this remark. A Dionysian life-task needs the hardness of the hammer, and one of its first essentials is without doubt the _joy even of destruction._ The command, "Harden yourselves!" and the deep conviction that _all creators are hard,_ is the really distinctive sign of a Dionysian nature.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.