The Red Book, page 28
30Perhaps you think that a man who consecrates his life to research leads a spiritual life and that his soul lives in 9/10 larger measure than anyone else’s. But such a life is also external, just as external as the life of a man who lives for outer things. To be sure, such a scholar does not live for outer things but for outer thoughts—not for himself, but for his object. If you say of a man that he has totally lost himself to the outer and wasted his years in excess, you must also say the same of this old man. He has thrown himself away in all the books and thoughts of others. Consequently his soul is in great need, it must humiliate itself and run into every stranger’s room to beg for the recognition that he fails to give her.
Therefore you see those old scholars running after recognition in a ridiculous and undignified manner. They are offended if their name is not mentioned, cast down if another one says the same thing in a better way, irreconcilable if someone alters theirs views in the least. Go to the meetings of scholars and you will see them, these lamentable old men with their great merits and their starved souls famished for recognition and their thirst which can never be slaked. The soul demands your folly, not your wisdom.
Therefore, because I rise above gendered masculinity and yet do not exceed the human, the feminine that is contemptible to me transforms itself into a meaningful being. This is the most difficult thing—to be beyond the gendered and yet remain within the human. If you rise above the gendered with the help of a general rule, you become the same as that rule and overreach the human. Therefore you become dry, hard, and inhuman.
You may go past the gendered for human reasons, and never for the sake of a general rule that remains the same in the most diverse situations, and therefore never has a perfect validity for each single situation. If you act from your humanity, you act from that particular situation without general principle, with only what corresponds to the situation. Thus you do justice to the situation, perhaps at the expense of a general rule. That should not be too painful for you, because you are not the rule. There is something else that is human, something all too human, and whoever has ended up there will do well to remember the blessing of the general rule.31 For the general rule also has meaning and has not been set up for fun. It comprises much venerable work of the human spirit. Such persons are not capable of a general principle above the gendered, but only their imagination is capable of what they have lost. They have become their own imagination and arbitrariness, to their own detriment. They need to remember the gendered, so that they wake from their dreams to reality.
It is as agonizing as a sleepless night to fulfill the beyond from the here and now, namely the other and the opposing in myself. It sneaks up like a fever, like a poisonous fog. And when your senses are excited and stretched to the utmost, the daimonic comes as something so insipid and worn out, so mild and stale, that it makes you sick. Here you would gladly stop feeling across to your beyond. Startled and disgusted, you long for the return of the supernal beauties of your visible world. You spit out and curse everything that lies beyond your lovely world, since you know that it is the disgust, scum, refuse of the human animal who stuffs himself in dark places, creeps along sidewalks, sniffs out every blessèd angle, and from the cradle to the grave enjoys only what has already been on everyone’s lips.
But here you may not stop—do not place your disgust between your here-and-now and your beyond. The way to your beyond leads through Hell and in fact through your own wholly particular Hell, whose bottom consists of knee-deep rubble, whose air is the spent breath of millions, whose fires are dwarflike passions, and whose devils are chimerical sign-boards.
Everything odious and disgusting is your own particular Hell. How can it be otherwise? Every other Hell was at least worth seeing or full of fun. But that is never Hell. Your Hell is made up of all the things that you always ejected from your sanctuary with a curse and a kick of the foot. When you step into your own Hell, never think that you come like one suffering in beauty, or as a proud pariah, but you come like a stupid and curious fool and gaze in wonder at the scraps that have fallen from your table.32 10/11
You really want to rage, but you see at the same time how well rage suits you. Your hellish absurdity stretches for miles. Good for you if you can swear! You will find that profanity is lifesaving. Thus if you go through Hell, you should not forget to give due attention to whatever crosses your path. Quietly look into everything that excites your contempt or rage; thereby you accomplish the miracle that I experienced with the pale maiden. You give soul to the soulless, and thereby it can come to something out of horrible nothingness. Thus you will redeem your other into life. Your values want to draw you away from what you presently are, to get you ahead of and beyond yourself. Your being, however, pulls you to the bottom like lead. You cannot at the same time live both, since both exclude each other. But on the way you can live both. Therefore the way redeems you. You cannot at the same time be on the mountain and in the valley, but your way leads you from mountain to valley and from valley to mountain. Much begins amusingly and leads into the dark. Hell has levels.33
One of the Lowly 34
Cap. iii.
[HI 11] In the following night,35 I found myself wandering once more, in a homely, snow-covered country. A gray evening sky covers the sun. The air is moist and frosty. Someone who does not look trustworthy has joined me. Most notably, he has only one eye and a few scars on his face. He is poor and dirtily clothed, a tramp. He has a black stubble beard that has not seen a razor for a long time. I have a good walking stick for any eventuality. “It’s damned cold,” he remarks after a while. I agree. After a longer pause he asks: “Where are you going?”
I: “I’m going to the next village, where I plan to stay overnight.”
He: “I’d like to do that too, but will hardly manage to get a bed.”
I: “Have you no money? Well, let us see. Are you out of work?”
He: “Yes, times are bad. Until a few days ago, I was working for a locksmith. But then he had no more work. Now I’m traveling and looking for work.”
I: “Wouldn’t you work for a farmer? There is always a shortage of farm labor.”
He: “Working for a farmer doesn’t suit me. That means getting up early in the morning—the work is hard and wages are low.”
I: “But it’s always much more beautiful in the country than in a town.”
He: “It’s boring in the country, one meets nobody.”
I: “Well, but there are also villagers.”
He: “But there is no mental stimulation, the farmers are clods.”
I look at him astonished. What, he still wants mental stimulation? Better that he honestly earn his keep, and when he has done that he can think of stimulation. 11/12
I: “But tell me, what kind of mental stimulation is there in the city?”
He: “You can go to the cinema in the evenings. That’s great and it’s cheap. You get to see everything that happens in the world.”
I have to think of Hell, where there are also cinemas for those who despised this institution on earth and did not go there because everyone else found it to their taste.
I: “What interested you most about the cinema?”
He: “One sees all sorts of stunning feats. There was one man who ran up houses. Another carried his head under his arm. Another even stood in the middle of a fire and wasn’t burnt. Yes, it’s really remarkable, the things that people can do.”
And that’s what this fellow calls mental stimulation! But wait—that does seem remarkable: didn’t the saints also carry their heads under their arms?36 Didn’t Saint Francis and Saint Ignatius levitate—and what about the three men in the fiery furnace?37 Isn’t it a blasphemous idea to consider the Acta Sanctorum as historical cinema?38 Oh, today’s miracles are simply somewhat less mythical than technical. I regard my companion with feeling—he lives the history of the world—and I?
I: “Certainly, it’s very well done. Did you see anything else like this?”
He: “Yes, I saw how the King of Spain was murdered.”
I: “But he wasn’t murdered at all.”
He: “Well, that doesn’t matter; in that case it was one of those damned capitalist kings. At least they got one of them. If all of them were taken out, the people would be free.”
Not a word more dare I say: Wilhelm Tell, a work by Friedrich Schiller—the man is standing right in the thick of it, in the stream of heroic story. One who announces the murder of the tyrant to a sleeping people.39
We have arrived at the inn, a country tavern—a reasonably clean parlor—a few men sit with beer in the corner. I am recognized as a “gentleman” and led into the better corner where a chequered cloth covers the end of a table. The other sits down at the far end of the table, and I decide to have him served a proper evening meal. He is already looking at me full of expectation and hunger—with his one eye.
I: “Where did you lose your eye?”
He: “In a brawl. But I also got my knife into the other fellow pretty nicely. After that he got three months. They gave me six. But it was beautiful in prison. At the time the building was completely new. I worked in the locksmith’s. There wasn’t much to do and yet there was enough to eat. Prison really isn’t all that bad.”
I look around to make sure that no one is listening to me talking with a former convict. But no one seems to have noticed. I seem to have ended up in well-to-do company. Are there also prisons in Hell for those who never saw the inside of one while they were alive? Incidentally—mustn’t it be a peculiarly beautiful feeling to hit bottom in reality at least once, where there is no going down any further, but only upward beckons at best? Where for once one stands before the whole height of reality?
He: “So after that there I was, out on the street, since they banished me. Then I went to France. It was lovely there.”
What demands beauty makes! Something can be learned from this man.
I: “Why did you have this brawl?”
He: “It was over a woman. She was carrying his bastard but I wanted to marry her. She was already due. After that she didn’t want to anymore. I haven’t heard from her.”
I: “How old are you now?”
He: “I’ll be thirty-five in spring. Once I find a proper job we can get married right off. I’ll find myself one, I will. There’s something wrong with my lungs, though. But that’ll soon get better again.”
12/13 He has a coughing fit. I think that the prospects are not good and silently admire the poor devil’s unswerving optimism.
After dinner I go to bed in a humble room. I hear how the other settles into his lodging for the night next door. He coughs several times. Then he falls still. Suddenly I awaken again at an uncanny moan and gurgle mixed with a half-stifled cough. I listen tensely—no doubt, it’s him. It sounds like something dangerous. I jump up and throw something on. I open the door of his room. Moonlight floods it. The man lies still dressed on a sack of straw. A dark stream of blood is flowing from his mouth and forming a puddle on the floor. He moans half choking and coughs out blood. He wants to get up but sinks back again—I hurry to support him but I see that the hand of death lies on him. He is sullied with blood twice over. My hands are covered with it. A rattling sigh escapes from him. Then every stiffness loosens, a gentle shudder passes over his limbs. And then everything is deathly still.
Where am I? Are there also cases of death in Hell for those who have never thought about death? I look at my bloodstained hands—as if I were a murderer. . . Is it not the blood of my brother that sticks to my hands? The moon paints my shadow black on the white walls of the chamber. What am I doing here? Why this horrible drama? I look inquiringly at the moon as a witness. How does this concern the moon? Has it not already seen worse? Has it not shone a hundred thousand times into broken eyes? This is certainly of no avail to its eternal craters—one more or less. Death? Does it not uncover the terrible deceit of life? Therefore it is probably all the same to the moon, whether and how one passes away. Only we kick up a fuss about it—with what right?
What did this one do? He worked, lazed about, laughed, drank, ate, slept, gave his eye for the woman, and for her sake forfeited his good name; furthermore, he lived the human myth after a fashion, he admired the wonder-workers, praised the death of the tyrant, and vaguely dreamed of the freedom of the people. And then—then he miserably died—like everyone else. That is generally valid. I sat down on the floor. What shadows over the earth! All lights gutter out in final despondency and loneliness. Death has entered—and there is no one left to grieve. This is a final truth and no riddle. What delusion could make us believe in riddles?
[2] We stand on the spiky stones of misery and death.
A destitute joins me and wants admittance into my soul, and I am thus not destitute enough. Where was my destitution when I did not live it? I was a player at life, one who thought earnestly about life and lived it easily. The destitute was far away and forgotten. Life had become difficult and murkier. Winter kept on going, and the destitute stood in snow and froze. I join myself with him, since I need him. He makes living light and easy. He leads to the depths, to the ground where I can see the heights. Without the depths, I do not have the heights. I may be on the heights, but precisely because of that I do not become aware of the heights. I therefore need the bottommost for my renewal. If I am always on the heights, I wear them out and the best becomes atrocious to me.
But because I do not want to have it, my best becomes a horror to me. Because of that I myself become a horror, a horror to myself and to others, and a bad spirit of torment. Be respectful and know that your best has become a horror, with that you save yourself and others from useless torment. A man who can no longer climb down from his heights is sick, and he brings himself and others to torment. If you have reached your depths, then you see your height light up brightly over you, worthy of desire and far-off, as if unreachable, since secretly you would prefer not to reach it since it seems unattainable to you. For you also love to praise your heights when you are low and to tell yourself that you would have only left them with pain, and that you did not live so long as you missed them. It is a good thing that you have almost become the other nature that makes you speak this way. But at bottom you know that it is not quite true.
At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings. You are not ashamed and do not regret it, since insofar as you live the life of your fellow beings and descend to their lowliness 13/14 you also climb into the holy stream of common life, where you are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs.
Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life. If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race. There you live the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment. How can you become if you never are? Therefore you need your bottommost, since there you are. But therefore you also need your heights, since there you become.
If you live the common life at your lowest reaches, then you become aware of your self. If you are on your heights, then you are your best, and you become aware only of your best, but not that which you are in the general life as a being. What one is as one who becomes, no one knows. But on the heights, imagination is at its strongest. For we imagine that we know what we are as developing beings, and even more so, the less we want to know what we are as beings. Because of that we do not love the condition of our being brought low, although or rather precisely because only there do we attain clear knowledge of ourselves.
Everything is riddlesome to one who is becoming, but not to one who is. He who suffers from riddles should take thought of his lowest condition; we solve those riddles from which we suffer, but not those which please us.
To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths, being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth. You think you are standing still like swamp water, but slowly you flow into the sea that covers the earth’s greatest deeps, and is so vast that firm land seems only an island imbedded in the womb of the immeasurable sea.
As a drop in the ocean you take part in the current, ebb and flow. You swell slowly on the land and slowly sink back again in interminably slow breaths. You wander vast distances in blurred currents and wash up on strange shores, not knowing how you got there. You mount the billows of huge storms and are swept back again into the depths. And you do not know how this happens to you. You had thought that your movement came from you and that it needed your decisions and efforts, so that you could get going and make progress. But with every conceivable effort you would never have achieved that movement and reached those areas to which the sea and the great wind of the world brought you.
From endless blue plains you sink into black depths; luminous fish draw you, marvelous branches twine around you from above. You slip through columns and twisting, wavering, dark-leaved plants, and the sea takes you up again in bright green water to white, sandy coasts, and a wave foams you ashore and swallows you back again, and a wide smooth swell lifts you softly and leads you again to new regions, to twisting plants, to slowly creeping slimy polyps, and to green water and white sand and breaking surf.
But from far off your heights shine to you above the sea in a golden light, like the moon emerging from the tide, and you become aware of yourself from afar. And longing seizes you and the will for your own movement. You want to cross over from being to becoming, since you have recognized the breath of the sea, and its flowing, that leads you here and there without your ever adhering; you have also recognized its surge that bears you to alien shores and carries you back, and gargles you up and down.
