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Thus Spake ZarathustraIdeasLibrary
Third Part · LIII. The Return Home

Welcome home: lonesomeness speaks to him

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O lonesomeness! My HOME, lonesomeness! Too long have I lived wildly in wild remoteness, to return to thee without tears!

Now threaten me with the finger as mothers threaten; now smile upon me as mothers smile; now say just: “Who was it that like a whirlwind once rushed away from me?—

—Who when departing called out: ‘Too long have I sat with lonesomeness; there have I unlearned silence!’ THAT hast thou learned now—surely?

O Zarathustra, everything do I know; and that thou wert MORE FORSAKEN amongst the many, thou unique one, than thou ever wert with me!

One thing is forsakenness, another matter is lonesomeness: THAT hast thou now learned! And that amongst men thou wilt ever be wild and strange:

—Wild and strange even when they love thee: for above all they want to be TREATED INDULGENTLY!

Here, however, art thou at home and house with thyself; here canst thou utter everything, and unbosom all motives; nothing is here ashamed of concealed, congealed feelings.

Here do all things come caressingly to thy talk and flatter thee: for they want to ride upon thy back. On every simile dost thou here ride to every truth.

Uprightly and openly mayest thou here talk to all things: and verily, it soundeth as praise in their ears, for one to talk to all things—directly!

Zarathustra weeps on returning to lonesomeness, which answers in a mother's voice. It says he was more forsaken among the many than he ever was with it, and that here he can speak to all things directly.

Commentary on this passage

Nietzsche elsewhere

Inspiration as revelationFriedrich Nietzsche · Ecce Homo, 1888Nietzsche

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'.

Commentary on this chapter

What the critics said

The lies of pity and the mountain airGeorg Brandes · Aristocratic Radicalism, 1889exposition

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.

The lies of pity and the mountain airGeorg Brandes · Aristocratic Radicalism, 1889exposition

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.

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Introduction to Thus Spake Zarathustra (1905) — Partisan source: the author shaped Nietzsche's posthumous reputation and is not a reliable interpreter.
Nietzsche's account of inspirationElisabeth Förster-Nietzsche · Introduction to Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1905biography

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.

Pity as Nietzsche's greatest dangerAnthony M. Ludovici · Notes on Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1909biography

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.