The grave-diggers dig for themselves diseases. Under old rubbish rest bad vapours. One should not stir up the marsh. One should live on mountains.
With blessed nostrils do I again breathe mountain-freedom. Freed at last is my nose from the smell of all human hubbub!
With sharp breezes tickled, as with sparkling wine, SNEEZETH my soul— sneezeth, and shouteth self-congratulatingly: “Health to thee!”
Thus spake Zarathustra.
One should not stir the marsh but live on mountains. Breathing mountain freedom again, his soul sneezes and cheers itself.
Nietzsche says that Zarathustra was written under an inspiration of revelatory force: thoughts flashed like lightning without choice, in an ecstasy where painful parts were required shades of light, and images offered themselves involuntarily, as Zarathustra says, 'all things came to one, and offered themselves as similes'.
Förster-Nietzsche quotes Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche describes writing Zarathustra as inspiration in the old sense: thoughts flashing up like lightning with necessity, ecstasy, and an involuntariness of images in which all things seem to come and want to become similes.
Ludovici reads 'The Return Home' as autobiography: Nietzsche confesses that pity was his greatest danger, pitting the lawgiver's far-sighted love of posterity against a meaner sympathy for the neighbour from which he suffered, and returning to solitude to recover from his attempt to be all things to all men.
This is an experiment in interactive reading, and in using AI to help you grow. Thus Spake Zarathustra is notoriously difficult for a modern reader; yet taken as a set of mental exercises, it is guaranteed to transform your thinking by the time you reach the end. Along the way you will have help from the companion, who is always beside the book.
Do you accept the challenge?
What the critics said
Brandes says that Zarathustra's greatest danger among men lay in forbearance and pity, which taught him to lie among the good, and that he returns to the free mountain air to sit among broken and half-written tables awaiting the hour when the lion comes with the doves.