The convalescent and the animals' recital

One morning, not long after his return to his cave, Zarathustra sprang up from his couch like a madman, crying with a frightful voice, and acting as if some one still lay on the couch who did not wish to rise.…

Zarathustra leaps from his couch and shouts at the thought as at a sleeper who will not rise. He hails it, then recoils in disgust.

Hardly, however, had Zarathustra spoken these words, when he fell down as one dead, and remained long as one dead. When however he again came to himself, then was he pale and trembling, and remained lying; and for long…

Zarathustra falls as if dead. The eagle brings food and the animals watch over him. When he smells an apple, they speak and urge him out into the world.

—O mine animals, answered Zarathustra, talk on thus and let me listen! It refresheth me so to hear your talk: where there is talk, there is the world as a garden unto me. How charming it is that there are words and…

Zarathustra delights in hearing his animals talk. He calls words and tones rainbow bridges between souls and speaking a beautiful folly.

—“O Zarathustra,” said then his animals, “to those who think like us, things all dance themselves: they come and hold out the hand and laugh and flee—and return. Everything goeth, everything returneth; eternally rolleth…

The animals sing that everything goes and returns, dies and blossoms, breaks and is rebuilt. The middle is everywhere and the path of eternity is crooked.

—O ye wags and barrel-organs! answered Zarathustra, and smiled once more, how well do ye know what had to be fulfilled in seven days:— —And how that monster crept into my throat and choked me! But I bit off its head and…

Zarathustra says he bit off the head of the monster that choked him. He reproaches the animals for watching his pain and says man is the cruellest animal, in tragedy, in hell and in 'pity'. His cry was not that man is bad, but that his baddest and his best are so small.

The great disgust at man—IT strangled me and had crept into my throat: and what the soothsayer had presaged: “All is alike, nothing is worth while, knowledge strangleth.” A long twilight limped on before me, a fatally…

Zarathustra tells how the disgust strangled him: the sadness yawned that the small man returns eternally. He saw the greatest and the smallest man naked and all too alike.

“Do not speak further, thou convalescent!”—so answered his animals, “but go out where the world waiteth for thee like a garden. Go out unto the roses, the bees, and the flocks of doves! Especially, however, unto the…

The animals send him out to the garden to learn singing from the birds. Zarathustra says his consolation was to sing once more, and they tell him to prepare a new lyre.

For thine animals know it well, O Zarathustra, who thou art and must become: behold, THOU ART THE TEACHER OF THE ETERNAL RETURN,—that is now THY fate!

The animals say this is his fate and his greatest danger. They set out the doctrine: all things and we ourselves return, in a great year that turns like a sand-glass.

And if thou wouldst now die, O Zarathustra, behold, we know also how thou wouldst then speak to thyself:—but thine animals beseech thee not to die yet! Thou wouldst speak, and without trembling, buoyant rather with…

The animals say how Zarathustra would speak if he died: souls are mortal, but the plexus of causes returns and creates him again. He comes again to the same life to teach recurrence and announce the Superman.

When the animals had spoken these words they were silent and waited, so that Zarathustra might say something to them: but Zarathustra did not hear that they were silent. On the contrary, he lay quietly with closed eyes…

The animals fall silent and wait. Zarathustra lies with closed eyes, not asleep, and they withdraw respectfully.