This, yea this, is bitterness to my bowels, that I can neither endure you naked nor clothed, ye present-day men!
All that is unhomelike in the future, and whatever maketh strayed birds shiver, is verily more homelike and familiar than your “reality.”
For thus speak ye: “Real are we wholly, and without faith and superstition”: thus do ye plume yourselves—alas! even without plumes!
Indeed, how would ye be ABLE to believe, ye divers-coloured ones!—ye who are pictures of all that hath ever been believed!
Perambulating refutations are ye, of belief itself, and a dislocation of all thought. UNTRUSTWORTHY ONES: thus do _I_ call you, ye real ones!
All periods prate against one another in your spirits; and the dreams and pratings of all periods were even realer than your awakeness!
Unfruitful are ye: THEREFORE do ye lack belief. But he who had to create, had always his presaging dreams and astral premonitions—and believed in believing!—
Half-open doors are ye, at which grave-diggers wait. And this is YOUR reality: “Everything deserveth to perish.”
What the critics said
Ludovici says 'The Land of Culture' epitomises Nietzsche's attack on the scholars of his day as sterile because they believe in nothing, and that its last verses explain his altruism: he rejects Christian pity and neighbour-love both as degenerative slave-values and because he can love only his children's land, redeeming his fathers' errors in his children.