ON THE WAY OF THE CREATOR

ON THE WAY OF THE CREATOR

DO YOU WANT, MY brother, to go into solitude? Would you seek the way to yourself? Pause just a moment and listen to me.

“He who seeks may easily get lost himself. All solitude is guilt”: thus speaks the herd. And you have long belonged to the herd.

The voice of the herd will still echo in you. And when you say, “I no longer have a common conscience with you,” then it will be a lament and an agony.

For see, that agony itself was born of one and the same conscience: and the last glimmer of that conscience still glows on your affliction.

But you want to go the way of your affliction, which is the way to yourself? Then show me your right and your strength to do so!

Are you a new strength and a new right? A first motion? A self-propelling wheel? Can you also compel stars to revolve around you?

Ah, there is so much lusting for the heights! There is so much convulsion of the ambitious! Show me that you are not one of the lustful and the ambitious!

Ah, there are so many great thoughts that do no more than a bellows : they puff up and make emptier.

You call yourself free? I want to hear your ruling thought, and not that you have escaped from a yoke.

Are you one of those entitled to escape from a yoke? There are many who cast away their final worth when they cast away their servitude.

Free from what? What does that matter to Zarathustra! But your eye should clearly show me: free for what?

Can you give to yourself your evil and your good and hang up your will above yourself as a law? Can you be judge for yourself and avenger of your law?

It is terrible to be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law. Thus is a star thrown forth into the void and into the icy breath of solitude.

Today you still suffer from the multitude, you individual: today you still have all your courage and your hopes.

But one day the solitude will weary you, one day your pride will yield and your courage quail. You will one day cry: “I am alone!”

One day you will no longer see your loftiness and will see your lowliness all-too-near; your sublimity itself will frighten you as a ghost. You will one day cry: “All is false!”

There are feelings that want to kill the lonesome one; if they do not succeed, well, they themselves must die! But are you capable of being a murderer?

Have you ever known, my brother, the word “contempt”? And the anguish of your justice in being just to those who despise you?

You force many to think differently about you; they charge that heavily to your account. You came near them and yet went past: that they will never forgive you.

You go above and beyond them: but the higher you rise, the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. But the one who flies is hated most of all.

“How could you be just to me!”—you must say—“I choose your injustice as my due portion.”

They throw injustice and filth at the lonely one: but my brother, if you would be a star, you must shine no less for them on that account!

And beware the good and just! They would like to crucify those who devise their own virtue-they hate the lonely one.

Beware also of holy simplicity! All that is not simple is unholy to it; it likes to play with fire too-and the stake.

And beware also the assaults of your love! The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to any one he meets.

To many men you may not give your hand, but only the paw; and I want your paw to have claws too.

But the worst enemy you can meet will always be you yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests.

Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils!

You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain.

You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes!

Lonely one, you are going the way of the creator: you would create a god for yourself out of your seven devils!

Lonely one, you are going the way of the lover: you love yourself, and therefore you despise yourself as only lovers despise.

The lover wants to create, because he despises! What does he knows of love who has not had to despise precisely what he loved!

With your love go into your loneliness and with your creation, my brother; and only much later will justice limp after you.

With my tears go into your loneliness, my brother. I love him who seeks to create over and beyond himself and thus perishes.-Thus spoke Zarathustra.