ON THE GREAT LONGING

ON THE GREAT LONGING

O MY SOUL, I taught you to say “today” as well as “once” and “formerly” and to dance your dance over every Here and There and Yonder.

O my soul, I delivered you from all nooks, I brushed dust, spiders and twilight from you.

O my soul, I washed the petty shame and the nook-virtue from you and persuaded you to stand naked before the eyes of the sun.

With the storm that is called “spirit” I blew across your surging sea; I blew all clouds away, I even strangled the strangler called “sin.”

O my soul, I gave you the right to say No like the storm and to say Yes as the open sky says Yes: you are as still as light and now you walk through denying storms.

O my soul, I gave you back the freedom over the created and the uncreated: and who knows, as you know, the voluptuousness of future things?

O my soul, I taught you the contempt that does not come like the gnawing of a worm, the great, the loving contempt, which loves most where it despises most.

O my soul, I taught you to be so persuasive that you persuade even the elements themselves to come to you: like the sun, which persuades the sea to rise even to its height.

O my soul, I took all obeying and knee-bending and obsequiousness from you; I myself gave you the names, “cessation of need” and “destiny.”

O my soul, I have given you new names and colorful toys, I have called you “destiny” and “circumference of circumferences” and “time’s umbilical cord” and “azure bell.”

O my soul, I gave your soil all wisdom to drink, all new wines, and also all immemorially old strong wines of wisdom.

O my soul, I poured every sun out on you and every night and every silence and every longing:-then you grew up for me as a vine.

O my soul, now you stand exuberant and heavy, a vine with swelling udders and full clusters of golden brown grapes:—

—crowded and weighed down by your happiness, waiting from superabundance and yet bashful in your expectancy.

O my soul, there is nowhere a soul more loving and comprehensive and spacious! Where could future and past be closer together than with you?

O my soul, I have given you everything and my hands have been made empty by you—and now! Now you say to me smiling and full of melancholy: “Which of us owes thanks?—

—“does the giver not owe thanks to the receiver for receiving? Is giving not a necessity? Is receiving not—mercy?”—

O my soul, I understand the smile of your melancholy: your over-abundance itself now stretches out longing hands!

Your fullness looks forth over raging seas, and seeks and waits: the longing of overfullness looks forth from the smiling heaven of your eyes!

And truly, O my soul! Who could see your smiling and not melt into tears? The angels themselves melt into tears through the overgraciousness of your smiling.

It is your graciousness and overgraciousness that does not want to complain and weep: and yet, O my soul, your smile longs for tears, and your trembling mouth for sobs.

“Is not all weeping complaining? And all complaining, accusing?” Thus you speak to yourself, and therefore, O my soul, you will rather smile than pour forth your grief—

—pour forth in gushing tears all your grief at your fullness and at the craving of the vine for the vintner and his knife!

But if you will not weep, not weep out your purple melancholy, then you will have to sing, O my soul!—Behold, I myself smile, I who foretold this to you:

—sing with a roaring song until all seas grow still to listen to your longing,—

—until over still longing seas the bark glides, the golden marvel, around whose gold all good, bad, marvelous things leap:—

—also many great and small beasts, and everything that has light marvelous feet, that can run on paths as blue as violets,—

—towards the golden marvel, the voluntary bark and its master: he, however, is the vintner who is waiting with his diamondstudded knife,—

—your great deliverer, O my soul, the nameless one-for whom only future songs will find names! And truly, your breath is already fragrant with future songs,—

—already you glow and dream, already you drink thirstily at all deep echoing wells of comfort, already your melancholy reposes in the bliss of future songs!—

O my soul, now I have given you everything and even the last that I have, and all my hands have been made empty by you:—that I bade you sing, behold, that was the last I had to give!

That I bade you sing, speak now, speak: which of us now—owes thanks?-But better still: sing to me, sing, O my soul! And let me thank you!—

Thus spoke Zarathustra.