Thus Spoke Zarathustra

— Alas, friends, do you perhaps also guess the double will of my heart?
That, that is my slope and my danger, that my gaze plunges into the height, and that my hand would like to hold and support itself—on the depths!
My will clings to man: with chains I bind myself to man, because it tears me upward to the Übermensch Overman/Superman!

Where are those whose ideal of a deity was set so high that nothing in reality could correspond to it, and who now, out of a piety unknown to the “pious,” speak to themselves like Zarathustra:

If there were gods—how could I endure not to be a god! . . Thus there are no gods!
I drew the conclusion, indeed: but now it draws me.
Creating—that is the great redemption from suffering, and life’s becoming light.
But what would there be to create if—gods were there?

Whoever does not know these highest ecstasies does not understand Nietzsche, and also does not understand in what respect one can find our time, despite its chatter about progress and despite its assurance that the “balance of happiness of humanity is becoming more favorable from generation to generation,” extraordinarily poor in genuine, true happiness, poor in originality, in genius and creative power, in significant people, in great moving thoughts, in short: poor in everything that previous humanity counted among the requisites of its high spirits. The entire technical-mechanical production of today, the entire detail-science of the collectors and specialists, the entire work of pity for the preservation of everything sick, invalid, gouty, and pestilential—does not outweigh that power which gathered itself in one human being to appear as a Beethoven symphony, as a Goethean Faust, and to prove to humanity what it could not know without such works: to what heights its feeling, its spirit could rise in and with individual powerful ones. — One such powerful one is also Nietzsche. But to expect a direct effect from him on the age would be very daring. Nietzsche is, as already indicated, inaccessible to the masses. The masses are too poor to be able to even see, empathize with, or even retain Nietzsche’s wealth of relationships. I know little, as a result of years of absence from Germany, of what the Germans have written about Nietzsche: that A small symbol appears here, and a credit note at the bottom of the page indicates: "Google logo and Cornell University credit text at bottom of page."