The Antichrist

By Nietzsche, Friedrich

Book Id: WPLBN0000062477
Format Type: PDF eBook
File Size: 0.6 MB
Reproduction Date: 2005

Title:	The Antichrist
Author:	Nietzsche, Friedrich
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Literature, Literature & thought, Writing.
Collections:	Classic Literature Collection
Historic Publication Date:
Publisher:	World Ebook Library


Citation APA MLA Chicago Nietzsche, F. (n.d.). The Antichrist. Retrieved from http://gutenberg.cc/

Excerpt
This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. It is possible that they may be among those who understand my Zarathustra: how could I confound myself with those who are now sprouting ears? -- First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously. The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily understands me -- I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops -- and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him... He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand manner -- to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm...Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self... Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers foreordained: of what account are the rest? -- The rest are merely humanity. -- One must make one's self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness of soul, in contempt. FRIEDRICH W. NIETZSCHE. 1. -- Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans -- we know well enough how remote our place is. Neither by land nor by water will you find the road to the Hyperboreans: even Pindar1,in his day, knew that much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death -- our life, our happiness...We have discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it? -- The man of today? -- I don't know either the way out or the way in; I am whatever doesn't know either the way out or the way in -- so sighs the man of today...This is the sort of modernity that made us ill, we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that forgives everything because it understands everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such south-winds! We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding out where to direct our courage. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our fate -- it was the fulness, the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happiness of the weakling, from resignation There was thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast -- for we had not yet found the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal…...

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