ON THE HAPPY ISLANDS

ON THE HAPPY ISLANDS1

THE FIGS ARE FALLING from the trees, they are good and sweet; and as they fall their red skins burst. I am a north wind to ripe figs.

Thus, like figs, do these teachings fall for you, my friends: now drink their juice and eat their sweet flesh! It is autumn all around and clear sky and afternoon.

Behold, what fullness is around us! And from such overflow it is delightful to look out upon distant seas.

Once one said God when one looked upon distant seas; but now I have taught you to say: Übermensch.

God is a conjecture: but I want your conjecturing not to reach beyond your creative will.

Could you create a god?—So be silent about all gods! But you could well create the Übermensch.

Perhaps not you yourselves, my brothers! But you could transform yourselves into fathers and forefathers of the Ubermensch: and let that be your best creation!—

God is a conjecture: but I should like your conjecturing to be bounded by the thinkable.

Could you conceive a god?-But may the will to truth mean this to you: that everything be changed into what is conceivable for man, visible for man, touchable by man! You should think through your own senses to the end!

And what you have called the world shall be created only by you: your reason, your image, your will, your love shall thus become the world! And truly, for your bliss, you knowers!

And how would you endure life without that hope, you knowers? Neither in the inconceivable could you have been born, nor in the irrational.

But let me reveal my heart to you entirely, my friends: if there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods.

Indeed I have drawn the conclusion; however, now it draws me.—

God is a conjecture: but who could drink all the agony of this conjecture without dying? Shall his faith be taken from the creator and from the eagle his soaring to eagle heights?

God is a thought that makes crooked all that is straight, and makes all that stands reel. How? Should time be gone, and all that is impermanent be only a lie?

To think this is giddiness and vertigo for human bones, and even vomiting to the stomach: truly, I call it the reeling sickness to conjecture such.

I call it evil and misanthropic: all that teaching about the One and the Plenum and the Unmoved and the Sufficient and the Permanent!

All the Permanent—that is only a parable! And the poets lie too much.—

But the best parables should speak of time and of becoming: let them be a praise and a justification of all impermanence!

Creation-that is the great redemption from suffering, and life’s becoming light. But that the creator may be, much suffering itself is needed and much change.

Yes, there must be much bitter dying in your life, you creators! Thus you are advocates and justifiers of all impermanence.

For the creator himself to be the newborn child, he must also be willing to bear the child and to endure the pains of childbirth.

Truly, through a hundred souls I went my way, and through a hundred cradles and birth pains. I have said many a farewell; I know the heartbreaking last hours.

But so wills my creative will, my fate. Or, to speak to you more honestly: just such a fate—wills my will.

All feeling suffers in me and is in prison: but my will always comes to me as my liberator and comforter.

Willing liberates: that is the true teaching of will and freedom—thus Zarathustra teaches it to you.

No longer willing and no longer valuing and no longer creating! ah, that this great weariness may always stay far from me!

In knowledge too I feel only my will’s joy in procreating and becoming; and if there is innocence in my knowledge, it is because the will to procreation is in it.

Away from God and gods this will has lured me; what would there be to create, if gods-existed!

But it always drives me again toward man, my fervent creative will; just as the hammer is driven to the stone.

Ah, you men, in the stone there sleeps an image, the image of my images! Ah, that it must sleep in the hardest, ugliest stone!

Now my hammer rages cruelly against its prison. Fragments fall from the stone: what is that to me?

I want to perfect it: for a shadow came to me—the stillest and lightest of all things once came to me!

The beauty of the Übermensch came to me as a shadow. Ah, my brothers! What are the gods to me now!—

Thus spoke Zarathustra.