With a wickedness do I begin every day: I mock at the winter with a cold bath: on that account grumbleth my stern house-mate.
Also do I like to tickle him with a wax-taper, that he may finally let the heavens emerge from ashy-grey twilight.
For especially wicked am I in the morning: at the early hour when the pail rattleth at the well, and horses neigh warmly in grey lanes:—
Impatiently do I then wait, that the clear sky may finally dawn for me, the snow-bearded winter-sky, the hoary one, the whitehead,—
—The winter-sky, the silent winter-sky, which often stifleth even its sun!
Did I perhaps learn from it the long clear silence? Or did it learn it from me? Or hath each of us devised it himself?
Of all good things the origin is a thousandfold,—all good roguish things spring into existence for joy: how could they always do so—for once only!
A good roguish thing is also the long silence, and to look, like the winter-sky, out of a clear, round-eyed countenance:—
—Like it to stifle one’s sun, and one’s inflexible solar will: verily, this art and this winter-roguishness have I learnt WELL!
My best-loved wickedness and art is it, that my silence hath learned not to betray itself by silence.
Clattering with diction and dice, I outwit the solemn assistants: all those stern watchers, shall my will and purpose elude.
That no one might see down into my depth and into mine ultimate will—for that purpose did I devise the long clear silence.
Many a shrewd one did I find: he veiled his countenance and made his water muddy, that no one might see therethrough and thereunder.
But precisely unto him came the shrewder distrusters and nut-crackers: precisely from him did they fish his best-concealed fish!
But the clear, the honest, the transparent—these are for me the wisest silent ones: in them, so PROFOUND is the depth that even the clearest water doth not—betray it.—