creatures. They
charm men with what would even alarm bulls.

And the blondes, by following the law of least resistance, have gone in
the other direction. The great majority of them--I speak, of course, of
natural blondes; not of the immoral wenches who work their atrocities
under cover of a synthetic blondeness--are quite as shallow and stupid
as they look. One seldom hears a blonde say anything worth hearing; the
most they commonly achieve is a specious, baby-like prattling, an
infantile artlessness. But let us not blame them for nature's work. Why,
after all, be intelligent? It is, at best, no more than a capacity for
unhappiness. The blonde not only doesn't miss it; she is even better off
without it. What imaginable intelligence could compensate her for the
flat blueness of her eyes, the xanthous pallor of her hair, the
doll-like pink of her cheeks? What conceivable cunning could do such
execution as her stupendous appeal to masculine vanity, sentimentality,
egoism?

If I were a woman I should want to be a blonde. My blondeness might be
hideous, but it would get me a husband, and it would make him cherish me
and love me.

XXIX

ALCOHOL

Envy, as I have said, is at the heart of the messianic delusion, the
mania to convert the happy sinner into a "good" man, and so make him
miserable. And at the heart of that envy is fear--the fear to sin, to
take a chance, to monkey with the buzzsaw. This ineradicable fear is the
outstanding mark of the fifth-rate man, at all times and everywhere. It
dominates his politics, his theology, his whole thinking. He is a moral
fellow because he is afraid to venture over the fence--and he hates the
man who is not.

The solemn proofs, so laboriously deduced from life insurance
statistics, that the man who uses alcohol, even moderately, dies
slightly sooner than the teetotaler--these proofs merely show that this
man is one who leads an active and vigorous life, and so faces hazards
and uses himself up--in brief, one who lives at high tempo and with full
joy, what Nietzsche used to call the _ja-sager_, or yes-sayer. He may,
in fact, die slightly sooner than the teetotaler, but he lives
infinitely longer. Moreover, his life, humanly speaking, is much more
worth while, to himself and to the race. He does the hard and dangerous
work of the world, he takes the chances, he makes the experiments. He is
the soldier, the artist, the innovator, the lover. All the great works
of man have