Why did I startle in my dream, so that I awoke? Did not a child come to me, carrying a mirror?
“O Zarathustra”—said the child unto me—“look at thyself in the mirror!”
But when I looked into the mirror, I shrieked, and my heart throbbed: for not myself did I see therein, but a devil’s grimace and derision.
Verily, all too well do I understand the dream’s portent and monition: my DOCTRINE is in danger; tares want to be called wheat!
Mine enemies have grown powerful and have disfigured the likeness of my doctrine, so that my dearest ones have to blush for the gifts that I gave them.
Lost are my friends; the hour hath come for me to seek my lost ones!—
What the critics said
Ludovici reads 'The Child with the Mirror' as Nietzsche's grief at the misinterpretation of his writings, and says it hints that a creator of new values is most obstructed by language itself, whose words are stamped with the race's long-ruling values, hence the obscurity of original thinkers.