and favourite doctrines (and
occasionally after yourselves) than in all the solemn pantomime and
trumping games before accusers and law-courts! Rather go out of the way!
Flee into concealment! And have your masks and your ruses, that ye may
be mistaken for what you are, or somewhat feared! And pray, don't forget
the garden, the garden with golden trellis-work! And have people around
you who are as a garden--or as music on the waters at eventide, when
already the day becomes a memory. Choose the GOOD solitude, the free,
wanton, lightsome solitude, which also gives you the right still to
remain good in any sense whatsoever! How poisonous, how crafty, how bad,
does every long war make one, which cannot be waged openly by means
of force! How PERSONAL does a long fear make one, a long watching
of enemies, of possible enemies! These pariahs of society, these
long-pursued, badly-persecuted ones--also the compulsory recluses, the
Spinozas or Giordano Brunos--always become in the end, even under the
most intellectual masquerade, and perhaps without being themselves aware
of it, refined vengeance-seekers and poison-Brewers (just lay bare
the foundation of Spinoza's ethics and theology!), not to speak of
the stupidity of moral indignation, which is the unfailing sign in a
philosopher that the sense of philosophical humour has left him. The
martyrdom of the philosopher, his "sacrifice for the sake of truth,"
forces into the light whatever of the agitator and actor lurks in him;
and if one has hitherto contemplated him only with artistic curiosity,
with regard to many a philosopher it is easy to understand the dangerous
desire to see him also in his deterioration (deteriorated into a
"martyr," into a stage-and-tribune-bawler). Only, that it is necessary
with such a desire to be clear WHAT spectacle one will see in any
case--merely a satyric play, merely an epilogue farce, merely the
continued proof that the long, real tragedy IS AT AN END, supposing that
every philosophy has been a long tragedy in its origin.
26. Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy,
where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority--where he may
forget "men who are the rule," as their exception;--exclusive only of
the case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger
instinct, as a discerner in the great and exceptional sense. Whoever, in
intercourse with men, does not occasionally glisten in all the green
and
|