“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 singing birds, to learn SINGING from them!
For singing is for the convalescent; the sound ones may talk. And when the sound also want songs, then want they other songs than the convalescent.”
—“O ye wags and barrel-organs, do be silent!” answered Zarathustra, and smiled at his animals. “How well ye know what consolation I devised for myself in seven days!
That I have to sing once more—THAT consolation did I devise for myself, and THIS convalescence: would ye also make another lyre-lay thereof?”
—“Do not talk further,” answered his animals once more; “rather, thou convalescent, prepare for thyself first a lyre, a new lyre!
For behold, O Zarathustra! For thy new lays there are needed new lyres.
Sing and bubble over, O Zarathustra, heal thy soul with new lays: that thou mayest bear thy great fate, which hath not yet been any one’s fate!
What the critics said
Brandes calls Zarathustra's eternal recurrence a somewhat shallow mysticism derived from the Pythagorean cycle and Ecclesiastes, the direct antithesis of Hartmann's world process ending in destruction, and notes that Blanqui and Le Bon advanced the same idea about the same time.
Mencken says that in Zarathustra Nietzsche treats recurrence as a philosophical speculation that well-nigh drives the prophet mad, quoting the passage in which Zarathustra will return with this sun, earth, eagle and serpent to the same life, to teach again the eternal recurrence of all things.
Ludovici argues that Zarathustra's cry of 'Disgust!' at his abysmal thought shows how far Nietzsche fell short of his own ideal of the man who cries da capo to all existence: his life of illness, disappointment and snubs made it impossible for him to think of eternal recurrence without loathing.
Ludovici sets out Nietzsche's relation to Darwin and Spencer: Nietzsche accepts evolution but makes the organism's formative will primary over environment, treats adaptation as mere reactivity, and replaces the passive struggle for existence with an active struggle for power, of which self-preservation is only an indirect result.
Ludovici argues that depriving a higher man of his so-called wickedness may do violence to the greatest in him, and that the noblest wickedness, that of courage and determination, is vanishing under slave-moralities, which is why Nietzsche cried that man's baddest is so small and that to be brave is good.