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First EssayGood and Evil, Good and Bad12
At this point I won`t suppress a sigh and a final hope. What is it exactly than I find so totally unbearable? Something which I cannot deal with on my own, which makes me choke and feel faint? Bad air! Bad air! It`s when something which has failed comes close to me, when I have to smell the entrails of a failed soul! Apart from that what can we not endure by way of need, deprivation, bad weather, infirmity, hardship, loneliness? Basically we can deal with all the other things, born as we are to an underground and struggling existence. We come back again and again into the light, we live over and over our golden hour of victory - and then we stand there, just as we were born, unbreakable, tense, ready for something new, for something even more difficult, more distant, like a bow which all trouble only serves to pull more tight.
But if there are heavenly goddesses who are our patrons, beyond good and evil, then from time to time grant me a glimpse, grant me a single glimpse into something perfect, something completely developed, something happy, powerful, triumphant, from which there is still something to fear! A glimpse of a man who justifies humanity, of a complementary and redeeming stroke-of-luck of a man, for whose sake we can hang onto a faith in humanity! . . .
For matters stand like this: the diminution and levelling of European man hides our greatest danger, for the sight of him makes us tired. We don`t see anything today which wants to be greater. We suspect that things are constantly going down and down into something thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian - humanity, there is no doubt, is becoming constantly "better" . . . Europe`s fate lies right here. With our fear of mankind we also have lost our love for mankind, our reverence for mankind, our hopes for mankind, even our will to be mankind. A glimpse at man makes us tired - what is today`s nihilism, if it is not that? . . . We are weary of man.
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