|
1873 - 76
|
| "...
where he has found incentive to do as others have
done and do it better he does not want to meet the
idler who, craving for distraction or sensation, strolls
about as though among the heaped up pictorial treasures
of some gallery. So as not to despair and be disgusted
among frail and hopeless idlers, among contemporaries
who seem to be active but in fact are merely wrought
up and fidgeting, the man of action looks back and
interrupts the course to his goal for once to breathe
freely. His goal, however, is some happiness, perhaps
not his own, often that of a people or of all mankind;
he flees resignation and uses history as a means against
resignation. In most cases, however, no reward beckons
him unless it be fame, that is, the expectation of
a place of honour in the temple of history where he
himself may teach, console, and warn those who come
after him. For his commandment reads: what once was
capable of magnifying the concept 'man' and of giving
it a more beautiful content must be present eternally
in order to eternally have this capacity. That the
great moments in the struggle of individuals form
a chain, that in them the high points of humanity
are linked throughout millennia, bat what is highest
in such a moment of the distant past be for me still
alive, bright and great -- this is the fundamental
thought of the faith in humanity which is expressed
in demand for a monumental history. Precisely this
demand however, that the great be eternal, occasions
the most terrible conflict. For all else which a1so
lives cries no. The monumental ought not arise --
that is the counter-watch-word. Dull habit, the small
and lowly which fills all corners of the world and
wafts like a dense earthly vapour around everything
great, deceiving, smothering and suffocating, obstructs
the path which the great must still travel to immortality.
Yet this path leads through human brains! Through
the brains of frightened short-lived animals who repeatedly
rise to the same needs and with effort fend off their
destruction for a short time.) ..."
"...
think of a man tossed and torn by a powerful
passion for a woman or a great thought: how
his world is changed! Glancing backwards he
feels blind, listening sideways he hears what
is foreign as a dull meaningless sound; what
he perceives at all he has never perceived
so before, so tangibly near, coloured, full
of sound and light as though he were apprehending
it with all his senses at once. All evaluations
are changed and devalued; there is so much
he can no longer value because he can hardly
feel it: he asks himself whether he has been
fooled the whole time by alien words and alien
opinions; he is astonished that his memory
so tirelessly runs in circles and is yet too
weak and too tired to leap even once out of
this circle. It is the most unjust condition
in the world, narrow, ungrateful to the past,
blind to dangers, deaf to warnings, a little
living whirlpool in a dead sea of night and
forgetting: and yet this condition -- unhistorical,
contra-historical through and through -- is
the cradle not only of an unjust, but rather
of every just deed; and no artist will paint
his picture, no general achieve victory nor
any people its freedom without first having
desired and striven for it in such an unhistorical
condition."
|
|
Return to Top |
