posted April 15, 2007 03:42 PM         

I teach you the overman.
Man is something that shall be overcome.

You have made your way from worm to man,
and much within you is still worm.

A polluted stream is man.
One must be a sea to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.

Lo, I teach you the overman: he is that sea;
in him your great contempt can go under.

What is the greatest experience you can have?
It is the hour of the great contempt.

The hour in which even your happiness becomes loathsome to you,
and so also your reason and virtue.

The hour when you say: "What good is my happiness!
It is poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency.
But my happiness should justify existence itself!"

The hour when you say: "What good is my reason!
Does it long for knowledge as the lion for his food?
It is poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency!"

The hour when you say: "What good is my virtue!
As yet it has not made me passionate.
How weary I am of my good and my evil!
It is all poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency!"

Have you ever spoken thus?
Have you ever cried thus?
Ah! If only I had heard you cry thus!

It is not your sin-
it is your smugness that cries to heaven!

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue?
Where is the frenzy with which you should be inspired?

Lo, I teach you the overman:
he is that lightning, he is that frenzy!-

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the overman-
a rope over an abyss.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end:
what is lovable in man is that he is an overture and a going under.

I love those that know not how to live except by going under,
for they are those who cross over.

I love the great despisers,
because they are the great devotees,
and arrows of longing for the other shore.

I love those who do not first seek behind the stars
for a reason to go under and be a sacrifice,
but sacrifice themselves to the earth,
that the earth may become the overman's.

I love him who lives to know,
and who wants to know so that the overman may live someday.
And thus he wants to go under.

I love him who works and invents to build a house for the overman,
and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant:
for thus he wants to go under.

I love him who loves his virtue:
for virtue is the will to go under,
and an arrow of longing.

I love him who holds back no drop of spirit for himself,
but wants to be entirely the spirit of his virtue:
thus he strides over the bridge as spirit.

I love him who makes his virtue his addiction and catastrophe:
thus, for his virtue's sake,
he wants to live on, and to live no longer.

I love him who does not want to have too many virtues.
One virtue is more of a virtue than two,
because it is more of a noose on which his catastrophe may hang.

I love him whose soul squanders itself,
who wants no thanks and returns none:
for he always gives away,
and does not want to preserve himself.

I love him who is abashed when the dice fall to make his fortune,
and asks, "Am I then a crooked gambler?"-
for he wants to perish.

I love him who casts golden words before his deeds,
and always does more than he promises:
for he wants to go under.

I love him who justifies future and redeems past generations:
for he wants to perish of the present.

I love him who chastens his God because he loves his God:
for he must perish by the wrath of his God.

I love him whose soul is deep, even in being wounded,
and who can perish of a small experience:
thus he goes quickly over the bridge.

I love him whose soul is so overfull so that he forgets himself,
and all things are in him: thus all things spell his going under.

I love him who has a free spirit and a free heart:
thus his head is only the entrails of his heart;
but his heart drives him to go under.

I love all who are like heavy drops,
falling one by one out of the dark cloud that hangs over men:
they herald the coming of the lightning,
and perish as heralds.

Lo, I am a herald of the lightning,
and a heavy drop out of the cloud:
but this lightning is called overman!"

[abriged]