ON APOSTATES

1

Ah, everything that lately stood green and many-hued on this meadow already lies faded and grey! And how much honey of hope have I carried away into my beehives!

All those young hearts have already become old-and not even old! only weary, ordinary, comfortable:-they put it: “We have become pious again.”

Lately I saw them run forth in early morning with brave steps: but the feet of their knowledge grew weary and now they slander even the courage they had in the morning!

Truly, many of them once lifted their legs like the dancer, the laughter of my wisdom beckoned to them:-then they thought better of it. Just now I saw them bent—to creep to the cross.

Once they fluttered around light and freedom like gnats and young poets. A little older, a little colder: and already are they mystifiers and mumblers and homebodies.

Perhaps their hearts despaired because solitude swallowed me like a whale? Perhaps their ears longingly listened in vain for me and for my trumpet and herald calls?

—Ah, there are ever only a few whose hearts have a long courage and playfulness; and in these the spirit also stays patient. But the rest are cowards.

The rest: these are always the great majority, the commonplace, the superfluous, the many-too-many—those are all cowards!—

He who is of my type will also meet the experiences of my type on the way: so that his first companions must be corpses and jesters.

His second companions, however—they will call themselves his believers: a living swarm, with much love, much folly, much adolescent veneration.

He among men who is of my type shall not bind his heart to those believers; he who knows the fickle, fainthearted nature of mankind will not believe in those springtimes and many colored meadows!

If they could do otherwise, then they would also will otherwise. The half and-half spoil every whole. That leaves will wither—what is there to wail about!

Let them fly and fall, O Zarathustra, and do not wail! Rather blow among them with rustling winds—

—blow among those leaves, O Zarathustra: so that all that is withered may run from you even faster!—

2

“We have become pious again”—so these apostates confess; and some of them are even too cowardly to confess it.

I look into their eyes,-then I tell it to their face and to the blush on their cheeks: You are such as pray again!

But it is disgrace to pray! Not for everyone, but for you and me and for whoever has his conscience in his head. For you it is a disgrace to pray!

You know it well: the cowardly devil in you who would like to clasp his hands and to fold his arms and to take it easier:-it was this cowardly devil who persuaded you: “There is a God!”

Through that, however, you have become one of those who dread the light, whom light never lets rest: now you must daily thrust your head deeper into night and fog!

And truly, you have chosen well the hour: for just now the nocturnal birds are flying again. The hour has come for all people who dread the light, the evening hour of rest, when they do not—“find rest.”

I hear it and smell it: their hour for hunt and procession has arrived, not indeed for a wild hunt, but for a tame, lame, snuffling, pussyfooting, prayer-muttering hunt,—

—for a hunt after soulful sneaks: all mousetraps for the heart have again been set! And whenever I lift a curtain a little night moth rushes out.

Did it perhaps squat there along with another little night moth? For everywhere I smell little concealed communities; and wherever there are closets there are new devotees in them and the atmosphere of devotees.

They sit for long evenings beside one another, and say: “Let us again become like little children and say, ‘dear God!’”—their mouths and stomachs upset by the pious confectioners.

Or they look for long evenings at a crafty, lurking cross-marked spider, that preaches prudence to the spiders themselves and teaches: “There is good spinning under crosses!”

Or they sit all day at swamps with fishing rods and on that account think themselves profound; but whoever fishes where there are no fish, I would not even call superficial!

Or they learn to play the harp in pious pleasure with a composer of songs who would like to harp himself into the hearts of young women-for he has tired of old women and their praises.

Or they learn to shudder with a scholarly half-madman who waits in darkened rooms for spirits to come to him—and the spirit has entirely departed!

Or they listen to an old, roving, whistling tramp who has learned the sadness of sounds from sad winds; now he whistles like the wind and preaches sadness in sad sounds.

And some of them have even become night watchmen: now they know how to blow horns and go about at night and awaken old things that had long fallen asleep.

Five sayings about old things I heard last night at the garden wall: they came from such old, sorrowful, desiccated night watchmen.

“For a father he does not care enough for his children: human fathers do it better!”—

“He is too old! He no longer cares for his children at all,”—answered the other night watchman.

“Has he any children? No one can prove it unless he himself proves it! I have long wished he would for once prove it thoroughly.”

“Prove? As if he had ever proved anything! Proving is difficult to him; he lays great stress on one’s believing him.”

“Yes! Yes! Belief makes him blessed, belief in him.9 Old people are like that! It’s the same with us too!”—

—Thus the two old night-watchmen and light-scarecrows spoke together and then tooted sorrowfully on their horns: so it happened last night at the garden wall.

But my heart writhed with laughter as if it would break and knew not, where? and sank into my midriff.

Truly, it will be the death of me yet, to choke with laughter when I see drunken asses and hear night watchmen thus doubt God.

Has the time not long since passed for all such doubts? Who may still awaken such old slumbering light-shunning things!

With the old gods it has long since come to an end:-and truly, they had a fine gay godlike end!

They did not die in “twilight”—as some lie!10 Instead: one day they—laughed themselves to death!

That happened when the ungodliest word came from a god himself—the word: “There is one God! You shall have no other gods before me!”—

—an old grimbeard of a god, a jealous one, thus forgot himself:—And all the gods laughed then and rocked on their chairs and cried: “Is it not precisely this godlike, that there are gods, but no God?”

Who has ears, let him hear.—-

Thus Zarathustra discoursed in the town which he loved and which is called “The Motley Cow.” For from here he had only two days to go to reach his cave again and his animals; but his soul rejoiced continually at the nearness of his return home.