7 passages
When yester-eve the moon arose, then did I fancy it about to bear a sun: so broad and teeming did it lie on the horizon. But it was a liar with its pregnancy; and sooner will I believe in the man in the moon than in the…
Zarathustra mistook the rising moon for a pregnant sun, but it was a liar. He compares it to a sneaking tom-cat and a covetous monk, then turns the parable on the 'sentimental dissemblers'.
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To despise the earthly hath your spirit been persuaded, but not your bowels: these, however, are the strongest in you! And now is your spirit ashamed to be at the service of your bowels, and goeth by-ways and lying ways…
The knowers' spirit is ashamed to serve its bowels and takes lying ways out. It dreams of gazing on life without desire, as a mirror with a hundred facets.
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Oh, ye sentimental dissemblers, ye covetous ones! Ye lack innocence in your desire: and now do ye defame desiring on that account! Verily, not as creators, as procreators, or as jubilators do ye love the earth! Where is…
The pure discerners lack innocence in desire and so defame desire. Innocence lies in the will to procreate, and beauty where one must will with the whole will. Their 'contemplation' is called emasculated ogling.
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Where is innocence? Where there is will to procreation.
Zarathustra defines innocence as the will to procreation.
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Verily, ye fill your mouth with noble words: and we are to believe that your heart overfloweth, ye cozeners? But MY words are poor, contemptible, stammering words: gladly do I pick up what falleth from the table at your…
Zarathustra calls his own words poor next to their noble speech, yet says they can tell the truth. He says the pure ones hide serpents behind a God's mask and that he once took them for godlike.
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But I came NIGH unto you: then came to me the day,—and now cometh it to you,—at an end is the moon’s love affair! See there! Surprised and pale doth it stand—before the rosy dawn! For already she cometh, the glowing…
Dawn comes and the moon stands pale. The sun thirsts for the sea and draws it up into light, and Zarathustra says he loves life like the sun and that knowledge means all that is deep ascending to his height.
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Innocence and creative desire, is all solar love!
The rising sun's love of the earth is named innocent, creative desire.
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What the critics said
Ludovici argues that Zarathustra, though Nietzsche's opus magnum, should not be read first: many chapters are nearly meaningless without knowledge of Nietzsche's life and friendships, and its philosophical views are best clarified by his other works, which he himself regarded as preparation for it.