enmantling
snowflakes!

--If I did not myself commiserate their PITY, the pity of those enviers
and injurers!

--If I did not myself sigh before them, and chatter with cold, and
patiently LET myself be swathed in their pity!

This is the wise waggish-will and good-will of my soul, that it
CONCEALETH NOT its winters and glacial storms; it concealeth not its
chilblains either.

To one man, lonesomeness is the flight of the sick one; to another, it
is the flight FROM the sick ones.

Let them HEAR me chattering and sighing with winter-cold, all those poor
squinting knaves around me! With such sighing and chattering do I flee
from their heated rooms.

Let them sympathise with me and sigh with me on account of my
chilblains: "At the ice of knowledge will he yet FREEZE TO DEATH!"--so
they mourn.

Meanwhile do I run with warm feet hither and thither on mine
olive-mount: in the sunny corner of mine olive-mount do I sing, and mock
at all pity.--

Thus sang Zarathustra.

LI. ON PASSING-BY.

Thus slowly wandering through many peoples and divers cities, did
Zarathustra return by round-about roads to his mountains and his cave.
And behold, thereby came he unawares also to the gate of the GREAT CITY.
Here, however, a foaming fool, with extended hands, sprang forward to
him and stood in his way. It was the same fool whom the people called
"the ape of Zarathustra:" for he had learned from him something of the
expression and modulation of language, and perhaps liked also to borrow
from the store of his wisdom. And the fool talked thus to Zarathustra:

O Zarathustra, here is the great city: here hast thou nothing to seek
and everything to lose.

Why wouldst thou wade through this mire? Have pity upon thy foot! Spit
rather on the gate of the city, and--turn back!

Here is the hell for anchorites' thoughts: here are great thoughts
seethed alive and boiled small.

Here do all great sentiments decay: here may only rattle-boned
sensations rattle!

Smellest thou not already the shambles and cookshops of the spirit?
Steameth not this city with the fumes of slaughtered spirit?

Seest thou not the souls hanging like limp dirty rags?--And they make
newspapers also out of these rags!

Hearest thou not how spirit hath here become a verbal game? Loathsome
verbal swill doth it vomit forth!--And they make newspapers also out of
this verbal swill.

They hound one another, and know not whither! They inflame one another,
a