Zarathustra

Suppose you stopped believing years ago, and you are not sorry. You are a decent person, with work, a few people you love, some goals, and a rule that you try not to hurt anyone. Under all of it there is a hollow feeling you cannot name, and the advice to make your own meaning has never told you how. The explanation you have probably settled on is that the hollow feeling is the price of honesty. The universe does not care, so nothing can matter very much, and a grown-up lives with that.

Nietzsche's book points the other way, and the claim built from it here is this. The hollow feeling comes from a very specific set of values that you never chose and cannot pay for. Suffering is the worst thing there is, everyone is equal, stay safe and do not stand out.¹ Those were guaranteed, once, by a God who was going to make it all add up. The God is gone, and the bill still arrives every month. What you feel is a morality with its guarantee removed.² The book's name for the person who lives contentedly on that code is the last man. The hollow feeling is what the same code feels like in someone who is not content yet.

The obvious repair is to choose better values, and the book says that cannot be done by choosing alone. A will that has thrown off every rule can say no, and it cannot make a yes by deciding to.³ A decision can take you to the place where a value might grow. The value itself grows out of a kind of life, and it arrives or it does not.⁴

What stands in the way of that person is a grudge, and neither doubt nor the indifferent universe has anything to do with it. The will hates what it cannot change, and the thing it can least change is its own past.⁵ There may be something in your past you would give anything to undo, and a life quietly arranged around never repeating it. That arrangement is the mechanism this book is about. Nietzsche's word for the grudge is revenge, and he thinks most of what we call morality is revenge in good clothes.⁶

So the book's one way out is not a new list of values. It is a test. Could you will your whole life back, every part of it, the worst included, exactly as it was, again and forever.⁷ Not tolerate it. Will it. The person who can do that has no grudge left, and only that person, the book says, can make a value instead of inheriting one.

That is the claim, and what follows is the argument for it, in the order the book makes it. A man comes down a mountain and finds a crowd that laughs at him and asks for its own emptiness.⁸⁹ He tries to teach it and fails.¹⁰ He learns that values grow out of a life, that a grudge stops them growing, and that the grudge is against time.¹¹¹² He finds the one thought that answers it, and it nearly kills him.¹³ Then he gathers the people who almost understood, and watches them kneel to a donkey.¹⁴ And the book ends with him walking away from them, waiting for children who never arrive.¹⁵ Where the argument holds, it fits the hollow feeling exactly. Where it stops, it stops in a place the book itself admits, and you will see the edge.

The decent, comfortable, modern person is not living without values. He is living on a very particular set of them. Suffering is the worst thing there is.¹⁶ Everyone is the same as everyone else.¹⁷ Keep your health, keep your small pleasures, and do not stand out.¹⁸ That set used to be paid for by a God who promised that a life lived that way would add up to something. The God is gone and the set is still running, and the hollow feeling is the sound it makes with nothing under it.

The book opens by putting exactly that person in a marketplace, and then it does something stranger than mocking him. It lets him win.

A man named Zarathustra has spent ten years alone on a mountain.¹⁹ One morning he decides he has too much and wants to give it away, so he comes down.²⁰²¹ On the way he meets an old hermit in the forest, a holy man who left people long ago to praise God.²² They talk, they part, and Zarathustra says to himself a sentence that everything after it depends on. Could it be possible.²³ This old saint in his forest has not yet heard that God is dead.²⁴ That sentence assumes something. It reports a death, as news, the way you would report that a bank had closed. Something that used to guarantee the accounts has stopped doing so, and most people have not been told yet.

Then he reaches a town, where a crowd has gathered to watch a tightrope walker.²⁵ He stands up and gives them his best speech, the one about what a human being could become. He calls that future creature the overman, and for this argument the word only means one thing.²⁶ The overman is whatever a person becomes when they stop inheriting their values and start making them. Man, he tells the crowd, is a rope stretched between the animal and that creature, a rope over an abyss.²⁷ What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.²⁸ The crowd hears this and thinks he is the warm-up act.²⁹ They laugh and call for the tightrope walker.³⁰

So he tries the other way round. If they will not listen to what a person could become, he will show them what a person becomes when nobody tries. He describes the most contemptible thing, and he calls it the last man.³¹

Here is what the last man is like, and each line can be tested against your own life as it goes past. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small.³² No shepherd and one herd.³³ Who still wants to rule, and who still wants to obey, when both are too much of a burden.³⁴ Everyone wants the same, everyone is the same, and whoever feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.³⁵ They have their little pleasure for the day and their little pleasure for the night, but they have a regard for health.³⁶ And the line the book is remembered for. We have invented happiness, say the last men, and blink.³⁷

That list is a moral code. Do not suffer. Do not rise above your neighbour, and do not let anyone rise above you. Look after your health, and take your pleasures small, so that losing them will not hurt. That is a complete ethics, with a highest good, which is the absence of pain, and a highest evil, which is difference. It is a whole way of ranking every choice, and read out on its own it sounds like simple decency.

One thing in the portrait should stop a careful listener. The book's last man feels nothing missing. He has invented happiness, and he blinks. So anyone who came here with a hollow feeling is entitled to ask whether this is a portrait of them at all. The speech answers that itself, in two sentences about soil, just before the last man appears. Man's soil, Zarathustra tells the crowd, is still rich enough.³⁸ But that soil will one day be poor and tame, and no tall tree will be able to grow from it.³⁹ So the last man is a forecast. He is where the code ends up, once the soil is used up and nothing in a person reaches for anything any more. The people in the square are not there yet, and neither is anyone who can still feel that something is missing. The book never mentions a hollow feeling, and the link is made here, once, on the strength of those two sentences. The hollow is rich soil with nothing planted in it. It is the difference between you and the portrait, and it is the best news in the scene. The blink is what comes later, on the day the feeling finally stops.

Now the part of the scene that matters. Zarathustra finishes describing the most contemptible thing he can think of, and the crowd shouts him down with delight.⁴⁰ All the people exulted and smacked their lips.⁴¹ Give us this last man, they shout, make us into these last men.⁴² Then we will make you a present of the overman.⁴³ He wanted to disgust them and instead he had written their advertisement. He says to himself that he is not the mouth for these ears, and that there is ice in their laughter.⁴⁴

The shout is a jeer, and it would be a mistake to count it as a vote. They are heckling a street preacher, and they offer to trade him his overman for the life he has just insulted. But look at what makes the joke possible. He described a life with no pain, no difference, small pleasures and good health, and he meant it as the worst thing he could say. He hears hatred in the laughter as well as ice. But nobody in the square argues with the portrait. One way a crowd comes to laugh off a portrait like that is when nothing in it strikes them as a loss. That is what a highest value looks like from the outside. Comfort is not one thing they want among others. It is the thing every other want is measured against. A scene in a book proves nothing about real people, and the laughter is only a picture of the ranking. The evidence, if there is any, is your own answer to one question. Is there anything in your life that outranks not being hurt.

That is the crowd. The other man in the square is the one to set beside it.

The tightrope walker begins his act above them. Halfway across, a jester in bright clothes comes out of the tower behind him. He runs along the rope, shouting at the walker to get out of the way. At the last step the jester lets out a yell like a devil and jumps clean over him.⁴⁵ The walker loses his balance, drops his pole, and falls into the square. The crowd scatters. Zarathustra stays, and kneels by the broken man.

What he says to the dying man is colder than people remember, and the cold half is the important half. The walker is afraid. He says the devil will drag him to hell.⁴⁶ Zarathustra answers, on his honour, that there is no devil and no hell.⁴⁷ The man's soul, he says, will be dead even sooner than his body, so there is nothing left to fear.⁴⁸ The walker takes this in. If it is true, he says, then he loses nothing by dying.⁴⁹ He was not much more than an animal taught to dance with blows and scraps of food.⁵⁰ And here Zarathustra disagrees with him. Not at all, he says.⁵¹ You made danger your calling, and there is nothing contemptible in that. Now you die of your calling, and for that I will bury you with my own hands.⁵²

The two were written to be put together, and the same word sits on both. The last man is the most contemptible thing. The dead acrobat has nothing contemptible in him. One of them is a comfortable crowd that wants to be made into itself, and the other is a corpse in a square. They differ on one thing, which is what each was willing to risk. The acrobat put a life on a rope for the sake of something that was not safety. The crowd would not put a small pleasure on the line for anything. And the book grades them the opposite way from how you would expect a crowd and a corpse to be graded.

Wanting comfort is not decadence, a sane person will say at this point. Not wanting to suffer, the objection says, is what a nervous system is for. A moral code that says do not hurt people, treat them as equals and look after your health is not a failure of nerve. It is, says the objection, most of what we have learned in two thousand years about living together. If Nietzsche is sneering at kindness, the book is a tantrum, and you can stop here.

The charge was never against comfort, and the scene shows where it lands. Nothing in the last man's list is condemned as a want. Health is good, small pleasures are good, and not being hurt is good. What the crowd's laughter showed is that it wanted nothing above them. Comfort had become the measure, the thing every other value had to justify itself to. The acrobat is praised because there was something in his life that outranked not suffering, and he lived by that ranking to the end. So the charge is narrow. Keep the kindness and keep the health. What the book withdraws is the ranking that puts the absence of pain at the top and lets it grade everything else. That ranking, and only that, is the last man.

And now you can see why the ranking hurts, even though it looks like sanity. A value at the top of a life has to be worth living for, not just worth avoiding. Try to wake up tomorrow and pursue the absence of pain. It cannot be pursued, only defended, and a life that consists of defence has a particular texture. Everything in it is there to protect, and nothing in it is the thing worth protecting, so none of it can ever feel like enough. That texture is the hollow feeling. A lock on a door is a good thing, and nobody wakes up in the morning to live for the lock. The last man's code puts the lock at the top of the house.

That needs one sharpening, or it catches the wrong people. A doctor spends her working life in a fever ward in a poor country, fighting other people's pain. She holds, word for word, that suffering is the worst thing there is. She is no last man, and the measure from the square shows why. She puts her own health on the line every week for something she ranks above her own comfort. So the code that hollows a life out is narrower than the sentence that suffering is bad. It is my own not suffering, placed at the top of my own life. The lock in question is the one on your own door.

The measure of risk has the opposite trouble, which is that it seems to let too many in. A gambler puts the house on one card. A man in a winged suit steps off a cliff on a Saturday morning. A fanatic walks into a crowd with a bomb under his coat. All three have something that outranks not being hurt, and if risk is the measure, the book has just praised all three. The words said over the dying acrobat do not settle it, since he is told that he made danger itself his calling. So the distinction that follows is drawn here, and not by the book. The man walked a rope because walking a rope was his work, and the danger was what the work cost. The gambler and the jumper have it the other way round. For them the danger is what they came for, and the cards and the cliff are the excuse for it. The acrobat's risk was a price he paid for something, and theirs is the thing being bought. So the measure is what a life was willing to pay for, and the size of the payment is only the sign of it. The fanatic is harder, because he plainly is paying for something. Nothing in this scene rules him out, and that should be admitted. It will take the book several more speeches to say what is wrong with him. The answer will be that his cause is made of what he wants brought down. For now the square gives a sign that is necessary and is not sufficient. A life with nothing above its own comfort is the last man's life. A life with something above its own comfort may still be a bad one.

Where did the code come from, and what exactly has gone. The book says that God is dead, and it draws the last man. It never joins the two in one place, so they are joined here. Anyone who knows the old religion will object that it never said suffering was the worst thing. It said nearly the opposite. It said suffering was a trial, and that the poor and the humble were the ones God watched most closely. That is true, and it is the mechanism. The old code put the sufferer at the centre of the moral world. It could afford to, because the suffering was going to be repaid. Everyone equal, be humble, do not rise, was a code that came with a guarantee. A life lived that way would be judged, rewarded, made to add up. Every pain was a deposit, and every refusal to stand out was noticed by someone. Take the watcher away and the commands do not vanish. They lose their guarantee and keep their force. The sufferer is still at the centre and equality is still the highest word. But pain is no longer a trial with a reward behind it. It is only pain, with nothing on the other side. The same pain shows it. A woman with a ruined hip once offered it up, and it counted for something. Her granddaughter's hip is a fault to be repaired, and until it is repaired it is pure loss. A code that cares most about suffering has now lost the one thing that made suffering worth anything. It has a single move left, which is to abolish it. On this account, that is how a creed that blessed the suffering turns into one that ranks suffering as the worst thing, without anybody deciding it. The crowd in the square still ranks pain as the worst thing and equality as the highest. It still has no room for the one who feels differently, and it no longer has any promise that this will add up. That is what a morality with its guarantee removed looks like. It looks like decency, and it feels like a hole.

Is this not just contempt for ordinary people, a man on a mountain calling the town a herd. Part of that charge sticks, because Zarathustra does call the crowd a herd. But what he decides to do about it is to stop preaching and look for companions. Zarathustra shall not be the shepherd and dog of a herd, he says. So the elitism is real and it goes in one direction only, which is away.

So the comfortable code is a complete morality with its guarantee gone, and the obvious repair is sitting right there. If the ranking is inherited and no longer guaranteed, throw it out and choose a better one. Put something worth living for at the top, on purpose, today. The next part of the book is a short speech about a camel, a lion and a child.⁵³ It exists to show why that cannot be done.

You cannot choose your values by an act of will, and that is why the obvious repair to the last man fails. A person can throw off every rule they were handed, and the throwing off is real and hard. But a will that has learned to say no has learned one word, and it cannot make a yes by deciding to. The book says this in a short speech about three animals, and the third animal is the one that is easy to get wrong.

Zarathustra has left the town with the dead acrobat on his back, buried him, and found a few listeners. The first thing he teaches them is that the spirit goes through three changes.⁵⁵ It becomes a camel, the camel becomes a lion, and the lion at last becomes a child.⁵⁶

The camel comes first, and so does the one detail people skip. The camel does not merely carry. What is heavy, it asks, and it kneels down and wants to be well loaded.⁵⁷ It asks for the weight. That is what inherited morality feels like from the inside. Nobody forces a code on the camel. It kneels for the code, takes it on gladly, and calls the weight of it maturity. A camel is proud of what it can bear, and the pride is real, because bearing a heavy code is genuinely hard. The camel is the first stage, and a person who has never been one has nothing to overcome.

Then the camel goes into the desert alone, and there it becomes a lion.⁵⁸ The lion wants to win its freedom and be master in its own desert. It goes looking for its last master, and its last master is a dragon, and the dragon's name is Thou Shalt.⁵⁹ On every scale of the dragon a value glitters, golden, a thousand years old.⁶⁰ All value has already been created, says the dragon, and all created value is me.⁶¹ The lion faces it and says two words. I will.⁶²

If you have left a religion, a family's expectations, or a marriage that ran on rules, you have met this animal from the inside. The lion is the moment you say no to a thou shalt and feel the floor hold. The book does not sneer at it. To create freedom for oneself, it says, and a holy no even to duty, for that there is need of the lion.⁶³ The no is holy. That word is chosen.

Then comes the sentence this part rests on. To create new values, that even the lion cannot yet do.⁶⁴ But to create freedom for new creating, that the might of the lion can do.⁶⁵

The two halves answer each other. The lion makes a space. It cannot put anything in the space. It has exactly one power, which is refusal, and refusal is a relation to something that already exists. You can only say no to a thou shalt that is standing in front of you. Take the dragon away and the lion has nothing to say.

Here is the person the book is describing, and you may know them or be them. They left the church at nineteen and they are now forty, and every value they hold is the negative of one they were raised with. The church said obey, so they hold that nothing is owed. The church said the body is shameful, so they hold that nothing about the body is. The church said one truth, so they hold that no one may claim one. Every position is a lion's position. Every one is a no with a thou shalt still visible behind it. The freedom is real, and what they have created is a desert with a dead dragon in it. The book does not give the reason for the lion's limit in so many words. It says the lion cannot create, and stops, so the reason has to be supplied. A value built out of opposition keeps the shape of the thing it opposes, the way a mould keeps the shape of the statue. It is the old value, inverted, and still doing the ranking.

So the third animal cannot be a stronger lion. That is the natural mistake, because everyone wants the third stage to be the second one with more courage. Zarathustra asks it himself. Why must the preying lion still become a child.⁶⁶ What can the child do that the lion cannot.⁶⁷

Here is the answer, and it is a list of seven things, and every one of them is a thing a lion cannot be. Innocence is the child, and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling out of itself, a first movement, a holy yes.⁶⁸

Each word on the list is doing work, so it goes slowly. Innocence comes first. The lion is never innocent. It is defined by what it fights. Forgetting is second, and the lion cannot forget, because a no needs its thou shalt kept in view. A new beginning, a game, a wheel that rolls from its own centre and not from a push. A first movement. That phrase matters most. Everything the lion does is a second movement, a response. Only the child moves first. And what it says, when it moves, is yes.

So the plain version of the three stages is this. A value is not something you pick up from a shelf of options. The camel gets its values by kneeling for them. The lion gets no values, only room. A value only appears when something in you moves first. When that happens no rule is being obeyed and none refused, and there is only a yes to what is already under way. A decision is a lion's act, and this is a different kind of thing altogether, closer to a game than to a choice.

The book's own first page seems to say the opposite. Zarathustra chose to come down the mountain. That looks like a value picked by an act of will, one morning, by a man who could have stayed. If he can do it, why can you not. The book describes the morning. He did not weigh it up. He had become weary of his wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey, and he needed hands stretched out to take it.⁶⁹ The going down is overflow. Something in him was full and moved first, and the decision was the last thing to arrive, not the first. That is the child's kind of act, and it proves the rule rather than breaking it. He did not choose a value. A value he already had ran over the edge.

Which raises the question the next two speeches answer. If values are not chosen, where do they come from. Where did the last man's code come from, if not from a decision.

The book's answer is a body. There is a speech about the people who invented a beyond, and a God to live in it. The book calls them believers in a world behind this one, a backworld.⁷⁰ Zarathustra says he was one.⁷¹ And then he says what made the beyond. It was the body that despaired of the body.⁷² Suffering it was, and powerlessness, that created all backworlds.⁷³ And a weariness that wants to reach the end with one leap, a death leap.⁷⁴ A poor ignorant weariness that no longer wants even to want.⁷⁵ That, he says, created all gods and all worlds beyond.⁷⁶

Set that against the last man's list, suffering the worst thing, nobody standing out, everyone equal, health above all. A body that hurt, that could not do what it wanted, that was tired of wanting. That body made a world in which pain is the great fact and wanting is the fault. Then it put a God in charge of that world to guarantee it, which is why losing the God removes the guarantee and leaves the code. The values the last man kneels for were never chosen by anyone. They were secreted, the way a wound makes scar tissue, by a particular kind of life in a particular kind of distress. That is what a value is. It is what a body does about its condition.

An everyday case shows the general rule before the book states it. You decide, on the first of January, that from now on you value honesty above comfort. By March you are lying to your dentist about flossing, and the decision is nowhere. Something made the decision, and something else, which was not consulted, went on wanting what it had always wanted. The next speech, to the people who despise the body, gives those two things their names. The one that decides and announces is the conscious mind, the part of you that says I. The one that wants is called the self, and the self is the whole living body. Behind your thoughts and feelings stands a mighty commander, an unknown wise man, and it is called self.⁷⁷ In your body it dwells, your body it is.⁷⁸ And then the line that matters for values. The creating body created for itself the spirit, as a hand for its will.⁷⁹ So the conscious mind, which made the January decision, is a hand. The valuing is done by the self, which is the body the hand belongs to. A hand can refuse to pick something up, so the conscious mind can say no. A hand cannot decide what the body wants, so it cannot make a value. When it announces that it has chosen one, the book says, the self laughs at it and at its proud leaps.⁸⁰ The lion is the conscious mind at full strength, and that is why the lion can clear the ground and cannot plant anything in it.

Now the three animals and the body fit into one picture. The camel kneels for values a tired body made long ago. The lion, which is the conscious will at full strength, can refuse them and do nothing else. The child is what it looks like when a body that is not in despair does the valuing on its own. A first movement, a yes that was not asked for. The rule underneath all of it is that a new value needs a new kind of life. No kind of life can be decided into existence.

One thing in the child's list has been left alone on purpose, and it is the word forgetting. It sounds like a licence, forget the past, be innocent, do as you like, and a lazy reader takes it as one. The book will say what this forgetting is much later, in a cave, and it is neither amnesia nor a licence.⁸¹ It turns out to be among the hardest things the book asks, and for now that is only a promise.

So values are not chosen, because the camel kneels for them and the lion can only clear the ground. The child that creates is a life moving first, and no stronger will can substitute for it. The old values were made by a suffering body, and valuing is something the body does, with the conscious mind as its hand. The last man cannot be fixed by resolution alone, and neither can you.

That is a hard saying, and flossing is too easy a case to carry it. There are people who changed what they live for on purpose, on a date they can name. Before the argument goes any further, the rule has to meet them.

A decision can carry a person to the place where a new value could grow, and it can never be the value. That is the claim of this part, and it is here because the last part has an obvious hole in it. People do change what they live for, and they do it on purpose, and everyone knows somebody who has. The dentist and the flossing showed that a weak resolution fails. It showed nothing about a strong one.

So here is the objection at its full strength, as three people. A woman stopped drinking on a date she can still name, after nineteen years. A man who cared for nothing but his career joined a lifeboat crew at thirty-five because a friend asked him. At forty-five it is the thing he would give the career up for. A couple who liked their freedom sat at a kitchen table and decided to have a child. The child is now the centre of two lives. Each of them decided, and each of them now holds something at the top of their life that was not there before. If that is not choosing a value by an act of will, the objection says, then the words mean nothing. And a book that tells the last man he cannot fix himself by resolution has been refuted at every meeting in every church basement.

What anyone would expect is that the decision made the value. She decided to value sobriety, and then she valued it. Look at what happened in her case in the order it happened, because the order is the argument.

On the morning she decided, she wanted a drink exactly as much as she had the morning before. The decision changed nothing in what she wanted, and she will tell you so. What it changed was where she put her body. It poured the bottles into the sink. It drove her home by a road that did not pass the shop, and it sat her in a room of strangers on a Tuesday night. It picked up the phone at eleven at night when every part of her wanted something else. For months she did not value being sober. She endured it, with her jaw set, one evening at a time. All of that was the conscious will at full strength, and all of it was a no.

Then, on some ordinary evening she cannot date, she noticed that she did not want it. Something else had come to matter more, a clear head in the morning, or her daughter no longer checking her face at the door. She did not decide that. She found it already there, the way you find that a wound has closed. So her story has two events in it and not one. The decision has a date, and the value has none, because it arrived, and she found it after it had come.

Now the second person, whom you may also have met. He made the same decision, poured out the same bottles, sat in the same room, and has not had a drink in eleven years. And nothing ever arrived. He is dry and he is bitter, and his whole life is organised around the thing he does not do. He is sober against drink, the way the man who left the church at nineteen is free against the church. That is a lion, eleven years on, standing guard over a dead dragon. These are pictures and no study, and anyone can check them against the people they know. Two people, one decision, one practice, and two outcomes. If the decision were enough to make the value, both of them would have it. So the decision did something real, and what it did was something other than making the value.

The parents show the same two events more plainly. They decided to have the child, and that was theirs to decide. Nobody has ever decided to love one. They put themselves in the place where that love usually comes, and it came, and it came from somewhere the kitchen table could not reach. The lifeboat man says it himself, if he is honest. He turned up to a year of cold Thursday drills out of plain stubbornness. He decided to turn up, and the caring was not his to decide, and one night it was simply the case.

So the objection has found something true, and the rule from the last part has to be said more carefully. The conscious mind was called a hand, and a hand can do more than refuse. It can carry. It can take the body to a room, a desert, a marriage, a discipline, and hold it there on days the body would rather leave. What the hand cannot do is make the body want what it finds there. The flossing failed for a reason that had nothing to do with weak resolve. It failed because a resolution was asked to do the wanting, and wanting is not a hand's work.

The book has this, and it is easy to read past. The camel does not wait to be turned into a lion. Loaded with everything heavy, it hurries into the desert, on its own legs, and the change happens out there in the loneliest place.⁸² The camel chose the desert, and it did not choose what happened to it there. And there is one line, much later, which is the nearest thing to a method the book ever gives. Whoever wants to learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance. Nobody flies into flying.⁸³ That is practice, and practice is slow, and it is what a will can actually do. It is an order of learning with no promise at the end of it, and the book never adds one.

Sleep is the nearest everyday case, and it fits up to a point that should be marked. You can decide to go to bed. You can darken the room, put the phone in the kitchen, and lie down at the same hour every night. You cannot decide to fall asleep, and the harder you try, the wider awake you are. Everything a will can do for sleep is done before the sleep, and the last step is not yours. That much carries over to values exactly. Here is what does not. Sleep comes to nearly everyone who lies down in the dark. A new value has no such record, and the bitter man in the meeting room is the proof.

So the exact part of a value that can never be decided is its first movement. You can decide to stand where it might happen. You can decide to stay there for years. Whether something in you then moves toward a thing, unasked, for its own sake, is not an act of yours. It is the event the book calls the child. The objection survives as a correction to the rule, and the rule survives the objection. Decisions are real and they are necessary, and they are never the thing itself.

And that answers a worry the last part left open, which is whether any of this leaves you anything to do. If values cannot be chosen, it sounds as though a person can only wait, like someone at a bus stop on a road with no buses. But the will now has three jobs, and none of them is waiting. It can refuse, which is the lion's work. It can carry, as the camel carried itself into the desert. And there is a third job that the woman's story points at without naming.

Ask why the value arrived in her and never arrived in him. They did the same things. The book's answer, which will take the next four parts to earn, is that something in him was in the way. On this account a living thing left to itself does the valuing unasked, the way the honey ran over on the mountain. Where that is not happening, the useful question is what is blocking it, since nobody can command it to start. The third job of the will is to find the block and remove it. What would count against this account is a person with no grudge at all to whom nothing ever comes, and the book offers no such person. In this picture the bitter man has a name for his block. It is everything the drinking cost him, which he cannot get back and has never stopped being angry about.

So far, then. A value has two events in it, a decision that carries and an arrival that cannot be ordered. The decision is necessary and is never enough. Where the arrival does not come, something is blocking it.

Before the block can be named, there is a prior question, because so far the arrival is only a word. If a life values unasked when nothing is in its way, what exactly is it doing when it does that. What is the drive under all of it. The book has a name for that drive, and it is the most abused name in it.

Will to power is the most misread phrase in the book, and this part is about what it means there. The claim is that it names what a life does when it grows past what it was. The hardest case the text dwells on is a life commanding itself.⁸⁴ Whoever hears only domination in it has stopped reading one paragraph too early. The text does rank, and this part will say so where it does.

The first speech is a short one about a thousand and one goals. Zarathustra says he has seen many lands and many peoples, and that no people could live without first valuing.⁸⁵ But if it wants to preserve itself, it must not value the way its neighbour values.⁸⁶ Much that one people called good, another called shameful.⁸⁷ He gives four examples, and two of them are enough to show the shape. One people raised every child to be first in everything, ahead of every rival.⁸⁸ Another was a people of archers, who held that a man must do two things well, which were to shoot straight and to tell the truth.⁸⁹ He names two more, one built on honouring father and mother and one on loyalty.⁹⁰⁹¹

These codes contradict each other, and each was held as simply right by the people who held it. So the question is what made a people call anything good at all. And the answer is one sentence. Praiseworthy is whatever seems hard to a people.⁹² What is indispensable and hard, they call good.⁹³ And what frees them from the greatest need, the rare thing, the hardest thing, they call holy.⁹⁴

The codes read differently through that. The people who prized truth-telling did not prize it because lying was foreign to them. They prized it because lying was the easy thing, in them, that they had to beat to stay what they were. A people that lived by honouring elders was a people for whom that was the hard thing that held it together. Nobody sat down and chose. Each people's good was the thing it most needed and could least afford to skip. The value was the pressure of that need, turned into a word. That is the same conclusion the body reached in the last part, now at the scale of a nation. A tired body made a beyond. A people under a particular strain made a table of goods.⁹⁵

The same thing can be seen in one person, which is where it is easiest to check. Think of someone you know who prizes patience above almost everything. It is often no placid man at all. It is a man with a temper, who found out young what the temper cost him, and built his character on top of it. The woman who cannot bear flattery is often a born flatterer who once caught herself at it. Ask what a person is proudest of in their own character, and you have often found the thing they had to beat. Their good is the record of a fight, just as the archers' was.

Then the line in which the famous phrase first appears. A table of goods hangs over every people.⁹⁶ Behold, it is the table of its overcomings.⁹⁷ Behold, it is the voice of its will to power.⁹⁸

The first half comes before the second. A table of goods is a table of overcomings. Each value on it names something that people had to get past in itself. The truth-tellers had to get past the wish to lie. It is the record of what a people had to beat, and no list of what it liked. And now the second half, which introduces the phrase. The voice of that beating is called will to power. The neighbour is in this speech too. A people, it says, honours whatever makes it rule and conquer and shine, to the dread and envy of the people next door.⁹⁹ But where the phrase itself appears, it describes first what a people does to itself when it calls something good.

The speech ends with a count and a gap. A thousand goals there have been so far, because a thousand peoples.¹⁰⁰ Only the yoke for the thousand necks is still missing.¹⁰¹ A thousand teams are each pulling their own way, and there is no single harness that would make them one. Humanity has no goal yet.¹⁰² So the last man was not standing on nothing. He was standing on one of the thousand, a table made by one people under one strain, with the strain forgotten and the God removed. And the thing that has never been made is a value for humanity as such. The overman would be its maker.

Then the harder speech, where the phrase gets its definition. It is addressed to the wisest men, the ones who say they are driven by a will to truth.¹⁰³ Zarathustra tells them that even their wish to understand is a wish to make the world bow to being understood. That is your whole will, you wisest ones, as a will to power.¹⁰⁴ So the drive to know sits on the same engine as the code of the people who had to be first.

Then he tells them what the engine is, and he tells it as something he learned by following living things around. Wherever I found a living thing, I found will to power.¹⁰⁵ And even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master.¹⁰⁶

That second sentence is where many readers close the book, so here is what comes after it. The weaker serves the stronger, it says, because its own will wants to be master over something weaker still. Read cold, that is a chain of domination, each link pressing on the one below, and the book means it. The next line is worse for anyone hoping for comfort. Where there is sacrifice, and service, and loving looks, there too is the will to be master.¹⁰⁷ Your devotion has it, your kindness has it, and the person who lives for their children has it. The text is blunt about it, and says the weaker slips by side paths into the heart of the stronger and steals power there.¹⁰⁸ Every one of those is a life working on something, shaping it, making it go a certain way. That shaping is what the word power names here.

So far this could still be the doctrine everyone fears, and here is the turn. Whatever lives, obeys, the speech says, and whatever cannot obey itself is commanded by something else.¹⁰⁹ Then comes the sentence that changes the picture. Commanding is harder than obeying.¹¹⁰

The reasons are where power stops sounding like domination and starts sounding like exposure. Whoever commands carries the burden of all who obey, and the burden readily crushes him.¹¹¹ All commanding is an attempt and a risk, in which the living thing stakes itself.¹¹² And even when a living thing commands itself, it must pay for its commanding.¹¹³ Of its own law it must become the judge and the avenger and the victim.¹¹⁴

Set those beside the chain of domination and the chain changes. The one at the top is the one carrying the most, paying the most, most exposed to being wrong. And the highest form the text names is commanding yourself, with no one else in the picture. Even that is paid for, it says, because you have to be your own judge, your own punisher, and the one punished. If you have ever held yourself to a standard you set, you have played the three roles. A woman decides that she will write for two hours every morning before work, and nobody asked her to. On the morning she sleeps in, there is no employer to answer to, so she has to be the court herself. She rules that the morning did not count. She makes the rest of her day a little worse on account of it, and she is the one it is made worse for. It is a small thing, and the whole structure is in it. There is a law nobody else gave, a judge nobody else appointed, and a cost nobody else pays. It is also why most people would rather be handed their rules. An order from outside comes with somebody else to blame. Power, in this book, is that. It is what a living thing does when it grows past what it was, and pays for it.

And then life speaks for itself.¹¹⁵ Behold, it said, I am that which must always overcome itself.¹¹⁶ Rather would I go under than renounce this one thing.¹¹⁷ Life, asked what it is, says it would sooner perish than stop getting past itself.

The whole picture, in the order it was built. A people values what it finds hard and needful. Its values are the record of what it has overcome, and the drive to overcome is what the book calls will to power. That drive is in everything alive, in service as much as in mastery. Its highest and most costly form is a life commanding itself, and paying as judge, avenger and victim. And life, asked what it is, says it is the thing that must always overcome itself, and would rather die than stop. Will to power is the name for that, and it is what valuing is made of, long before it is anything about politics.

There is a later speech in which Zarathustra weighs again the things his world calls most evil, and one of them is the craving to rule.¹¹⁸ He does not clean it up, and he still calls it the scourge of the hardest hearts.¹¹⁹ But there is one place where he honours it, and he gives the place a picture. That the lonely height should not stay lonely forever and satisfied with itself.¹²⁰ That the mountain should come to the valley.¹²¹ So rule is honoured where it flows downhill, as a height that has too much and comes down to give. That is Zarathustra's own opening act, the man who had too much honey and came down the mountain. Rule that stays on top and enjoys itself gets no such praise from him.

Someone will say that none of this changes what the doctrine is. Every living thing wants to be master, the weaker serves the stronger, and commanding is the highest form of life. A doctrine that says those three things is a doctrine of the strong over the weak. Adding sentences about self-command afterward does not change what it is. The text ranks by strength, it says in so many words that the weaker serves the stronger, and it means it. That is conceded, here, and not softened. What is claimed here is smaller. The case the text dwells on longest is self-command. The commander is the one who pays, and the craving to rule is honoured only where it gives. Someone who wanted a warrant for stepping on people would have to skip every sentence that gives the phrase its content. The text does hand them the ranking to start from, and that is not being hidden.

That sharpens the problem with the last man to a point. If life is self-overcoming, and every living thing has the drive, then the crowd in the square had it too. So why are they stuck. Why has a creature built to overcome itself settled for small pleasures and a regard for health. Something is in the way, as it was for the bitter man in the meeting room. It has turned the drive against the life it belongs to. The book has a name for what does that, and the next part is about it.

Much of what passes for morality is revenge, and this argument uses that to answer why a creature built to overcome itself settles for small pleasures. A will that cannot rise finds a way to hurt what it cannot become, and it gives the hurting a good name. The book runs this on four disguises in turn, equality, pity, holiness, and virtue. It does not say those words are always lies. It says that a specific motive hides under them often enough that you should check, and it gives you the test to check with.

The scene is a spider's hole.¹²³ Zarathustra stops at it and addresses the tarantula inside, and then he turns to the people he says are the tarantulas of the human world.¹²⁴ He calls them the preachers of equality, and he lets them speak for themselves. Their pledge, in their own words, is this. Revenge will we practise, and insult, on all who are not our equals.¹²⁵ And then the line that names the disguise. Will to equality, that itself shall henceforth be the name of virtue. And against everything that has power, we will raise our outcry.¹²⁶

Two halves, and they do different work. The first half renames a motive. A wish that everyone be brought level is to be called, from now on, virtue. The second half says where the noise is aimed. Against everything that has power. The tarantulas never say what they want to have, and they are exact about what they want brought down.

Then Zarathustra names what he hears in it. You preachers of equality, the tyrant-madness of powerlessness cries out of you for equality.¹²⁷ That phrase is the diagnosis. The tyrant-madness of powerlessness. A will that wants to rule, cannot, and turns the wanting into a demand that no one rule. The demand sounds like the opposite of tyranny and is made of the same material. He gives the mechanism one line later. When they become fine and cold, it is not spirit that makes them fine and cold, but envy.¹²⁸ And he gives the tell. When they call themselves the good and the just, he says, remember that the only thing they lack is power.¹²⁹

Now the test, which is the useful thing in this speech, because it can be run on yourself in a second. Distrust all in whom the drive to punish is strong.¹³⁰ Nothing is said against wanting a wrong put right. It is the drive to punish that gives the sign, and the speech says what the sign looks like from close up. Out of every one of their complaints sounds revenge, and being judge seems to them bliss.¹³¹ The pleasure is the tell. The last time you wanted someone to get what they deserved is a place to run it. Ask whether the wanting was for a wrong to be put right, or for someone above you to be brought down. If the second, then the book says you were a tarantula for that minute, and the name you gave it was justice.

One sentence says what this speech is for. For man to be redeemed from revenge, that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms.¹³² The highest hope in this book is the overman, the maker of a value for humanity. And the bridge to it is not strength, not knowledge, not courage. It is being rid of revenge. So here is what turns will to power against its own life. A self-overcoming creature stays settled because of a grudge against what is above it.

That has to be joined to something said earlier, because two explanations are now on the table. The portrait in the square was a portrait of tiredness. Who still wants to rule, who still wants to obey, both are too much of a burden. And the speech about the body said a weariness made the code. There is nothing spiteful in being tired, and a tired creature simply lies down. But a creature that has lain down has one problem left, and it is the one who is still standing.

You have probably worked in this office. Everyone in it has settled, comfortably, into doing the job at the level that causes no trouble. A new colleague arrives who stays late because she likes the work, and who asks why things are done the way they are. She has harmed nobody. Within a month she is called intense, and then not a team player, and then, at the coffee machine, who does she think she is. Nobody decided to dislike her. What she did was make the settled life visible as a choice, and her effort reads as an accusation that she never made. So she is brought level, by a joke, by being left off an invitation, by a word like try-hard. By the second month she has started to wonder what is wrong with her, and nobody had to tell her to. The portrait in the square had a line for this, and it went past quickly. Whoever feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse. Voluntarily is the exact word for what happened to her, and there is the spider, inside the last man's own list.

So the weariness made the code, and the grudge keeps it in place. Being tired is why they lay down, and spite is what they do to anyone who stands up. And the spite locks the door from the inside. Once you have joined in the sneer at people who reach for something, you cannot reach for anything yourself without becoming the thing you sneered at. The comfortable life turns out to be rest with a guard posted, and the guard also faces inward. That is how a creature built to overcome itself stays down. Its drive did not die. It was given other work, which is levelling. The book draws the tired last man and the spiteful tarantula in separate speeches, and it never says they are one creature. That join is made here, and the line about the madhouse is what it rests on.

One counter-case has to be met, because everyone can name it. People eaten by a grudge have made remarkable things. There is the novelist who writes to settle a score, and the founder who builds a company to humiliate the one that fired him. Spite is an engine, and the claim here is not that a grudge stops a person working. The claim is narrower. What a grudge makes keeps the shape of what it is against, which was the lion's limit, a no with enormous energy in it. And it never lets the maker rest, because the score it is settling lies in the past, where nothing can be settled. What revenge blocks is the first movement, the yes that is a reaction to nothing.

Equality is good, most listeners will say at this point, and they are right to say it. The demand that no one be born above anyone else is, the objection says, the best idea of the last three centuries. A man who hears envy in it is a man defending a hierarchy he happens to sit on top of.

Two things have to be said, and the second is a concession. The first is that the charge is about a motive, and a motive is tested by what it would settle for. It is the punishing test again, put to a cause where before it was put to a moment. Would you still want equality if it brought no one down. Suppose a world in which everyone rose to the height of the highest, and no one was pulled level. Would that satisfy the wanting. For some people, yes, and their wanting is not revenge, and the book has nothing to say against them. For others, the answer is a flicker of disappointment, because what they wanted was the bringing down. That flicker is the tarantula. It is also what was wrong with the fanatic in the square. His cause, as he was drawn there, was made of what he wanted brought down. The sorting of the two kinds is done here, because the speech itself does not stop to make it.

The second is a concession, and it starts with what the speech says and this argument will not hide. With these preachers of equality, Zarathustra says, I will not be mixed up. For justice speaks to me like this, men are not equal. And they shall not become so either.¹³³ That is a position on the arrangement itself, stated flat. The argument kept here is the one about a motive. And even where the motive charge lands, nothing follows about whether equality is a good arrangement. A demand can be made from spite and still be right. So what is kept here is the psychological claim, that revenge hides under moral words and can be found by that one test. No political conclusion is drawn from it in anything that follows.

Now the second disguise, which is closer to home than equality, because it lives in kindness. In the square the charge was narrow, and kindness was left alone. Here the book goes further, though it does not take the kindness back. It asks what one particular kind of kindness is feeding on. The disguise is pity, and the speech about it opens with a confession.

The speech is addressed to the pitying. Zarathustra says that when he saw the sufferer suffering, he was ashamed on account of the sufferer's shame. And when he helped him, he wounded his pride sorely.¹³⁴ The direction of the shame is the surprising part. The one who is helped is exposed, made into a sufferer in front of a witness, and the help drives that in. If you have ever been visited in a hospital by someone who was very kind, you may recognise the feeling. So the noble person, the text says, commands himself not to shame. Shame before all who suffer.¹³⁵

The next line turns pity into revenge. Great obligations do not make grateful, but revengeful. And when a small kindness is not forgotten, it becomes a gnawing worm.¹³⁶ Before deciding that is cynical, test it. Think of the person who did the most for you, at the moment you could do least for yourself. Ask whether what you feel toward them is only gratitude. If there is something underneath that flinches, that would rather not have needed them, that keeps a small account, that is the worm. The book says the pitier put it there.

Then the people Zarathustra says he cannot stand, the merciful, who are blessed in their pity and are too short of shame.¹³⁷ Now you have two kinds of helper, and they differ on one axis. One helps and is ashamed to be seen doing it, because he knows what it costs the one helped. The other helps and feels blessed, and the text stops there. The step from blessed to needing is added here, and it is short. A feeling you are blessed by is a feeling you come back for, and coming back for it needs the sufferer still there. That second kind is the pity this speech attacks, and its motive is the tarantula's with the sign reversed. The tarantula needs someone above it to bring down, and the pitier needs someone below it to stay down.

So what does the book put in pity's place, since it plainly does not say let the sufferer suffer. All great love, it says, is above all its pity, for it wants to create what it loves.¹³⁸ That is the axis. Pity leaves the loved one as he is, and feeds on him being that way. Great love wants to make him, wants him to become more than he is, and will wound his pride if that is what making him costs. The wound is no part of what separates it from the pitier. Great love can want all this for someone without needing it. It is the same shape as the height that came down the mountain in the last part. A fullness that gives, and does not need the one it gives to.

The priests get one paragraph, because their disguise is the oldest and it is the one the last man inherited. Zarathustra says they wrote signs of blood on the road they went, and their folly taught that truth is proved by blood.¹³⁹ That is a rule of evidence, and you have seen it used. In almost any argument there comes a moment when someone says, you cannot know, you have not been through what I have been through. Sometimes that is simply true, and it matters. Used as a trump card, it does something else. The one who has suffered most becomes the one who must be believed, and pain has turned into a credential. That is the priests' rule, still working with no priest in the room. It is the piece of the old creed that outlived its God, the habit of treating suffering as the central fact about a person. The old creed treasured suffering as proof. The last man's code fears it as the worst thing. Both keep it at the centre, and only the sign in front of it has changed.

And the virtuous get the sentence that closes the circle back to the marketplace. You want to be paid besides, you virtuous ones. You want reward for virtue, and heaven for earth, and eternity for your today. And now you are angry with me because I teach that there is no paymaster.¹⁴⁰ The anger is the tell. A person who was good for its own sake would shrug at the news. The one who is furious had been keeping a bill, and a bill is a claim against somebody. It is a claim against the wicked, who were supposed to be made to pay, and against a world that owes him. Virtue kept as a bill is a grudge with good manners. There is no paymaster. That is the death of God stated as an account closing. And Zarathustra refuses even the consolation the modern person reaches for. I do not even teach, he says, that virtue is its own reward.¹⁴¹ Then the sorrow. Reward and punishment, he says, have been lied into the very ground of things.¹⁴² And the list of the words he wants you to grow tired of ends with this one. Revenge in justice.¹⁴³

That last phrase joins the four. Revenge dressed as justice is what the tarantulas were about and what the virtuous are about. The priests and the pitying are the two faces in between, so that is four disguises worn by one motive.

The argument of this part, as steps. A will that cannot rise turns against what is above it. It renames that turning as virtue, and the drive to punish is the sign of it. The same will, when it helps, can come to need the helped to stay down, and the same will, when it prays, makes suffering into proof. And when it is good, it wants to be paid, and is furious that the paymaster is gone. Redemption from all of that is the bridge to the highest hope. Revenge is what turns life's self-overcoming into a grudge against the life it belongs to.

One question is left over, and it is the deepest one the book asks. Revenge is against what is above. But above is only the first target. What is the will's grudge really against, at bottom, once every rival has been brought level and every helper sent away. The book's answer is two short words, and neither of them names a person.

The deepest revenge is the will's rage at time, and this part is about how everything in the last one grows from it. A will can push forward and cannot push back. Against everything that has already happened it is powerless. Out of that one powerlessness, the book says, come punishment and the idea that suffering is deserved.¹⁴⁴ At the end of the same road is the verdict that everything deserves to pass away. The grudge under all four disguises is against the fact that what was, was.

The book gets there through a man who tells the future. A soothsayer comes to Zarathustra with a teaching that fits in three short sentences. All is empty. All is alike. All was.¹⁴⁵ It is the last man's inner voice with the blinking removed. If nothing is worth more than anything else, then nothing is worth the effort. The world flattens into a plain where every direction is the same. Zarathustra hears it and cannot eat or drink for three days.¹⁴⁶ That night he dreams that he is the night watchman of the graves, in a castle of death on a mountain, among coffins of glass. A wind tears the gates open and throws a black coffin at his feet.¹⁴⁷ The coffin bursts, and what comes out is not death. It is a thousand peals of laughter. Children, angels, owls, fools, and butterflies the size of children, all laughing at him.¹⁴⁸ That laughter comes back at the end of the next part, and when it comes back you will know what it is.

Then the speech that answers the soothsayer, and it is the centre of the book. It is called On Redemption. Zarathustra says he walks among people as among fragments and limbs of human beings, and then he says the same of time.¹⁴⁹ All that is past is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident.¹⁵⁰

A past is a pile of things that happened, that add up to nothing, that could have gone otherwise and did not. The speech is about why nobody can make that pile into a whole.

First Zarathustra says what he had taught before, because he is about to correct it. He had taught that the will is a creator. That was the child's holy yes. Now, he says, learn this too. The will itself is still a prisoner.¹⁵¹

The cell is this. Willing liberates, but what is the name of that which puts even the liberator in chains. It was.¹⁵² That is the name of the will's gnashing of teeth and loneliest sorrow.¹⁵³¹⁵⁴ Powerless against what has been done, it is a malicious spectator of everything past. The will cannot will backward. That it cannot break time, that is the will's loneliest sorrow.¹⁵⁵

The case to run it on is the one you brought with you. There is a thing you did, or a thing that was done to you, that you would give anything to undo. Every faculty you have can be pointed at it. You can think about it, feel about it, learn from it, atone for it, talk about it in a room with a professional. The one thing you cannot do is will it. The will only has one direction, and the thing is behind it. The text gives the picture. That which was, that is the name of the stone which the will cannot roll.¹⁵⁶ The book's revenge lands outward, on other people and on life itself. Turning it on yourself is this reading's case.

And now the mechanism, which is the sentence the tarantulas were waiting for. A will that cannot roll the stone does not sit quietly beside it. The text says what it does. And so it rolls stones, out of wrath and ill temper, and takes revenge on whatever does not feel wrath and ill temper as it does.¹⁵⁷ The will that was powerless against time becomes a doer of harm to everything that can suffer. Then the definition, and the book marks it as the definition. This, yes this alone, is revenge itself. The will's ill will against time and its it was.¹⁵⁸

So the tarantula's envy of the height, the pitier blessed in his pity, the priest's rule that blood proves truth, were the outer rings. That needs showing, because envy of a colleague does not feel like a quarrel with time.

A man of forty-five watches a younger colleague get the post he wanted. What he feels is aimed at her, and it is worth asking what exactly hurts. She has done nothing to him. What hurts is that someone else is standing where he meant to stand. She is there and he is not because at twenty-five he took the safe job, and at thirty he did not go back to study. At thirty-eight he did not apply. Each of those is done, and none of them can now be otherwise. If he could still become what she is, he would feel a spur. In his case the envy began where the road closed. What a person is not has been fixed by what they were. So his grudge against her is a grudge against his own shut past, wearing her face. Her face can be reached, and his twenty-fifth year cannot. The bitter man in the meeting room is the same case. What he cannot forgive the drinking is the years it took, and the years are where nothing can reach them.

At the centre, then, is a will facing a stone it cannot move, and lashing out at whatever is in reach. Now the question is what the lashing out looks like when it is not a spider. The text's answer is that it has been the best thinking humans ever did.

The spirit of revenge, my friends, that has been man's best thinking so far, and where there was suffering, there was always supposed to be punishment.¹⁵⁹ That is the claim, and it is about every system that ever said suffering must be paid for and a wrong balanced by a pain. Each of them, on this account, grew out of a will that could not move the stone and needed somebody to hurt. Punishment, the text says, is what revenge calls itself. With a lying word it feigns a good conscience.¹⁶⁰

A fair listener will object that punishment protects people. A violent man behind a locked door cannot hurt anyone tonight, and a heavy fine slows the next driver down. None of that needs a grudge. That is right, and the book's sentence is narrower than it first sounds. Where there was suffering, there was always supposed to be punishment. Its target is the demand that a pain be answered with a pain, so that the account balances. Protection looks forward, to who is kept safe. Balance looks backward, to what the man has coming. The two usually travel together, which is why they are so hard to tell apart, and the old test separates them. Suppose the violent man could be made harmless with no suffering to him at all. If something in you would feel cheated by that, the cheated part is what this speech is about.

And then the step that takes it from the courtroom into the whole of life. Because there is suffering in the one who wills, because he cannot will backward, willing itself and all life was supposed to be punishment. If the only way the will can face the stone is to find a punishment for it, it will find a guilty party. Sooner or later the guilty party is existence. Being alive at all becomes the crime that the suffering pays for. The text says cloud after cloud rolled over the spirit, until at last madness preached. Everything passes away, therefore everything deserves to pass away.¹⁶¹ Madness says it, at the end of a long sequence, as the final symptom. It is where the soothsayer's all is empty comes from. A will that could not have the past its own way concludes that the past, and the present, and everything, deserved to go. On the book's account, nothing matters is what a grudge against time sounds like when it has given up and dressed as wisdom. You have heard it at a smaller scale. A man is passed over, or left, or fails at the one thing he really tried. A month later he is explaining that it is all pointless anyway, careers, marriage, the whole game. It sounds like philosophy, and it arrived on the day of the loss. It is a sulk that has learned to speak in general terms.

Now the case again, and this time run the mechanism on it. The thing you would undo. You have organised your life around not being that person again. Say what that organisation is, in the book's terms. It is the will, facing a stone, finding something it can hurt. The only thing in reach is you. So it punishes the one who did the thing, every day, in small ways, by keeping you smaller than the person who might do it again. Every door you do not walk through because of what happened is part of the sentence. And the sentence does not touch the stone. The thing that was done is exactly as done as it was. The punishment is real, and it lands on the wrong object, because the right object is behind the will where nothing can reach it.

That has to be tested at once, because it seems to condemn exactly the wrong people. A man drove home drunk at thirty, and someone died. He has not touched a drink since, and he never will. Most people would say he has learned, and they would be right. So is that closed door part of a sentence. The measure needed is already to hand. A closed door is repair when it protects somebody. It is punishment when it only makes you smaller and touches nothing. His not drinking protects every person on the road he drives, so that door is repair. Now the same man, seen a little more closely. He also never let himself marry, because a man who did that does not deserve a family. He turned down the better job, and when something good comes to him he finds a way to spoil it. None of that protects anyone, and the person who died is exactly as dead. Those doors are the sentence. It is one man and one event, with two kinds of closed door. From the inside he cannot tell them apart at first, because both of them feel like conscience. The old question sorts them. If opening a door would feel like getting off too lightly, that door is part of the sentence.

The third case is the uncomfortable one. A woman was attacked in a car park at night, and she has never walked alone after dark since. For the first years that is plain good sense. Twenty years on she lives in another city, and the door is still closed. Behind it are most of her evenings, several friendships, and about half the life she would have had. The door no longer answers to any danger she could name. Here the measure gives an answer that sounds cruel. Part of what she calls caution is that night, still serving its sentence on her. There is no blame in saying so, since she did nothing. A will facing a stone punishes whoever is in reach, and she was in reach. The book's word, revenge, fits her worse than it fits anyone. The mechanism fits her exactly.

So here is the shape of the problem. Revenge is the will's ill will against what was. It cannot reach what was, so it hurts what it can, and it names the hurting justice, or morality, or being hard on yourself, or wisdom. And the cure cannot be to stop wanting, because that is the soothsayer's road. Forgiveness is what most people would reach for next, and the book never discusses it. What the speech does say is that the will must will something higher than all reconciliation, and it breaks off asking how.¹⁶² On its account the only cure is for the will to have the past as its own. And owning the past is the one thing it cannot do.

The text says what the cure would be, in one sentence. To redeem those who are past, and to transform every it was into a thus I willed it. That alone would I call redemption.¹⁶³

The word is will, and the obvious question is whether this is only acceptance under a harder name. Acceptance is the advice to make your peace with what cannot be changed. The speech is asking for more, since a will that has only agreed to tolerate is still a prisoner. What more could mean in a real person is not yet clear, and it will get a whole part to itself. From outside the two look the same, and the book gives no way to tell them apart from outside.

And the chapter ends with the formula said twice, and the second time is the door to what comes next. All it was is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident, until the creating will says to it, but thus I willed it. That is the past tense, and it is the one you have heard. Then the will says it in the future tense. Thus shall I will it.¹⁶⁴ That is a strange thing to say. Nobody says I shall will it about something that is over. The future tense only makes sense if the past is somehow still to come. The chapter does not say how it could be, and Zarathustra stops with it.

Which is the last thing to take from this speech, and the text supplies it as an accusation. When he has finished, a hunchback who was listening asks him a question. Why does Zarathustra speak differently to his pupils than he speaks to himself.¹⁶⁵ The teacher has just described a demand, and the man in the crowd has noticed that the teacher is not meeting it. Two chapters later, in a chapter called The Stillest Hour, a voice tells Zarathustra that he knows something and will not say it. He agrees. He knows it and does not speak it, and he leaves his friends rather than speak it.¹⁶⁶¹⁶⁷ So the book has now made the largest demand it will ever make, and the man making it cannot say the thought that would meet it. The book is being honest there about the size of what it is asking.

So the root of revenge is a will that cannot go backward, and the only cure named is to will the past. The book says so in words that need the past to be able to come back. And the man who says them cannot yet speak the thought that would make it possible.

So the question is this. How can anyone will backward. What thought would have to be held for thus I willed it to be sayable, honestly, about the worst thing that ever happened to you. Zarathustra goes to sea, and on the ship, at night, he tells the sailors a riddle.

The thought that answers it was is the thought that everything comes back. If every moment returns, then every moment is tied to every other, and to will one thing forward is to will everything back. The past stops being what happened to you and becomes what you will. In the chapter where the thought first appears, it is never stated as a fact about the universe. It is put as a question, in a riddle, told to sailors at night. The one character who states it flat is told off for making it too easy. There is a reason for that shape, and this part gets to it.

Zarathustra is on a ship.¹⁶⁸ For two days he says nothing, and on the evening of the second day he tells the sailors a vision he had.¹⁶⁹ He calls it a riddle for the bold, for the riddle-drunk, for the ones who are glad of twilight.¹⁷⁰ In the vision he is climbing a mountain path in a corpse-coloured twilight, and a dwarf is sitting on his shoulders.¹⁷¹ The dwarf is the spirit of gravity, which he calls his devil and his arch-enemy.¹⁷² Half dwarf, half mole, lame, making him lame, pouring lead into his ear.¹⁷³ The dwarf whispers that a stone thrown high must fall, and that Zarathustra has thrown himself high and will fall on himself.¹⁷⁴ The dwarf is the voice that says everything heavy is true and everything that rises is a mistake. It is the soothsayer's all was, riding on a man's back.

Zarathustra stops, and says that it is he or the dwarf, and the dwarf jumps off.¹⁷⁵ They are standing at a gateway. Two roads meet there. The text says they contradict each other, that they knock heads, and that it is here, at this gateway, that they come together.¹⁷⁶ The name of the gateway is written above it. In German it is one word, and the word literally means the blink of an eye. Moment.¹⁷⁷ One road runs backward from the gate, and it lasts an eternity. The other runs forward from the gate, and that is another eternity. Two infinite roads, meeting at the smallest possible point, which is now.¹⁷⁸

Then Zarathustra asks the dwarf whether the two roads contradict each other forever. And the dwarf gives an answer, and the answer is the one you were probably expecting from a video about the eternal recurrence. Everything straight lies, the dwarf murmurs, contemptuously. All truth is crooked. Time itself is a circle.¹⁷⁹

This is the moment to slow down. The doctrine of the circle, the claim that time loops and everything repeats, is said by the dwarf, with contempt, as a shrug. And Zarathustra's response is anger. You spirit of gravity, do not make it too easy for yourself. Or I will leave you squatting where you squat, lame-foot.¹⁸⁰ So here is the reading this argument takes, said once. The book does contain the circle as a claim about the cosmos. Later Zarathustra's own animals will sing it, and he himself will sing of a ring of return. That reading is not used here. In the scene that introduces the thought, the one who states it flat is rebuked for making it easy, and Zarathustra himself never states it. What he is after is something the dwarf's version leaves out.

And then he says what that something is, and he says it entirely in questions. This gateway, he says. From it a long road runs backward. Must not whatever can run, of all things, have already run down this road once. Must not whatever can happen, of all things, have already happened, been done, run past.¹⁸¹ That is the first step, and its form matters. It does not say time is a circle. It asks whether, if the road behind is endless, everything that can happen has already had its turn. Now the second step, and without it the argument has a hole.

And if everything has already been, what do you think of this moment, dwarf. Must not this gateway too have already been. And are not all things knotted together so firmly that this moment drags all coming things after it. Therefore, itself too.¹⁸²

A case first, before the general form. You are sitting where you are now, listening to this. Everything that led to this minute is behind you, tied to it, because without any one of those things this minute would not be this minute. And everything that follows this minute is tied to it in the same way, because this minute is one of its causes. The text asks whether, on an endless road, this knot must not have been tied before, and must not drag itself round again. Therefore, itself too. That is the inference as the text puts it, and every step of it is a question. Whether endless time really means every possible thing has happened is not settled here, and this argument does not claim it is. What matters is what the thought does to a will that holds it.

Then the text stops being abstract and goes small on purpose. And this slow spider that creeps in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you at the gateway, whispering together, whispering of eternal things. Must we not all have been here before. And return, and run down that other road, out ahead of us, down that long dreadful road. Must we not eternally return.¹⁸³ A spider, moonlight, two figures talking at a gate, and no great deed anywhere in the picture. It is put to a nothing-moment, the kind of minute that makes up almost all of a life. The question is whether that minute, exactly that, could be willed back forever.

This is the answer to the speech on redemption, and the connection is the whole argument, and the text leaves it to you. The will cannot will backward, and the past is a stone behind it. But if everything returns, the past is also ahead. The thing you would give anything to undo is not only behind you on the backward road. It is in front of you on the forward road, and it is coming round, and the will can will forward. So for the first time, the will has the past in the direction it can push. Thus shall I will it was the strange future tense that speech ended on, and it was waiting for this gate. Suppose the worst thing that ever happened to you is coming again, exactly as it was. Then you can stand at the gate with it coming, and a yes to a thing that is coming is a thing willed. The stone has not moved, and the will has been given a way to face it that is not powerlessness.

One thing must be said about this yes, because the three metamorphoses said values cannot be chosen. What happens at the gate is not a choice between two options. It is the child's yes, which arrives or does not, and the book shows it arriving on a cave floor and never shows how.

So the recurrence, in this chapter, is a way of holding your whole life in the one direction your will can push. As a fact about the cosmos it is the dwarf's version. As a question put to a will facing its own past, it is something else. It is the only thought in the book that gives thus I willed it a place to be said. That is why it comes as a riddle. A fact can be told to you, and a test can only be taken, and this chapter knows which one it is handing over.

There is a hard objection here, and it comes in two halves. The first is from inside the chapter, whose title is a vision and a riddle. Everything in it is a dream told at night to sailors, Zarathustra never once says that things return, and every sentence about it is a question. So someone can say that this whole answer is built on a passage where the author carefully declined to claim anything. The reply has been given already, which is that a test can only be put, and putting it is asking.

The second half is harder. If nothing really returns, the yes is a yes to a fiction. A person is being asked to will something back that is not, in fact, coming. And it is fair to ask how a thought believed to be false could do anything to a will at all. The answer is that the questions which tell people most about themselves nearly all work this way. Would you do it again. Nobody who asks that thinks you will get the chance, and it sorts people in a second. You know your answer before the question is finished. What would you do if nobody ever found out. What would you do with one year left. None of these has to be true in order to work. They work because the flinch is real even when the scene is invented. The recurrence is that kind of question, pressed as far as it can go. It does not ask whether you would do one thing again. It asks whether you would have all of it again, forever, with nothing changed, and what it measures is how much grudge is left. That reply has a price, and it should be paid openly. If the thought is a test and not a fact, then the past is not really on the road ahead. The will finally pushing in the right direction is a picture, and no more than a picture. What survives is smaller and still enough. The thought cannot give anyone their past back. It can show a person in a second whether they are still at war with their past. And it shows what ending that war would be, which is a yes where you expected a ceasefire. Whether things really return is left unsettled here, because the test does not need it.

Then the vision changes, and this is the half that the sailors are asked to solve. The dwarf is gone, the gateway is gone. Zarathustra hears a dog howl. He sees a young shepherd on the ground, writhing, choking, his face twisted, and a black, heavy snake hanging out of his mouth.¹⁸⁴ The snake has crawled into his throat while he slept and bitten fast.¹⁸⁵ Zarathustra pulls at it, and pulls, and cannot get it out. Then something in him cries out. Bite, bite, its head off.¹⁸⁶

And the shepherd bites. He bites well, spits the head far away, and springs up.¹⁸⁷ No longer shepherd, the text says, no longer man. A changed one, lit from around, who laughed. Never yet on earth did a man laugh as he laughed.¹⁸⁸ That is the laughter from the coffin. The thousand peals that came out of the dead in the soothsayer's dream have a face now. The face belongs to someone who has bitten through something. And the text says what he is now, a changed one, neither shepherd nor man. This is as close as anyone in the book comes to the creature preached in the square. It lasts for one clause, and then the chapter moves on.

Then the chapter ends, and it does not end on the laughter. It ends on Zarathustra, who heard it and is not the one who laughed. My longing for that laughter gnaws at me, he says. Oh, how can I still bear to live. And how could I bear to die now.¹⁸⁹

So in this chapter the eternal recurrence is put as a question. The argument runs from an endless road behind, to this moment having been, to this moment dragging everything after it, to itself too. It answers the speech on redemption by putting the past where a will can be asked about it. The shepherd shows what taking the test looks like from the outside, and Zarathustra shows that seeing it is not the same as doing it.

That leaves the riddle the sailors were given. What was the snake. What is the black, heavy thing that crawls into a person while they sleep, that pulling cannot remove, that must be bitten through before the laugh. The book answers it in the chapter where Zarathustra finally calls the thought up in himself, and it nearly kills him.

What nearly kills Zarathustra is that the small man will return, and his own suffering is not what he names. When he finally calls the thought up in himself, the thing he chokes on is his own disgust at the crowd from the square. That disgust is the last revenge he knows he has. A yes that leaves out what you despise is a grudge with better taste. The yes is not real until it includes the thing you most want gone from the world. The book makes him find that out on the floor of a cave.

He is home, in his cave, on the mountain.¹⁹⁰ One morning he springs up from his bed like a madman and shouts at something that has not yet spoken.¹⁹¹ Up, abysmal thought, out of my depth.¹⁹² I am your cock and your morning dawn, you sleepy worm.¹⁹³ Up, up. He calls it his most abysmal thought, and says he wants to hear it.¹⁹⁴ And when it comes, he does not hear it. He falls down like a dead man, and lies like a dead man for a long time.¹⁹⁵ When he comes back to himself he is pale and trembling and will not eat or drink for seven days.¹⁹⁶ His eagle and his snake tend him.¹⁹⁷

The shape comes before the words. A man has spent a whole book preaching that values are made by a yes and that the will must own its past. He has put his hardest thought to sailors as a riddle, and now he puts it to himself, and it knocks him flat for a week. Whatever the thought is, it is the kind of thing that happens to you, and agreeing with it is beside the point.

On the seventh day his animals speak to him, and what they say is the eternal recurrence as a doctrine.¹⁹⁸ Everything goes, everything comes back.¹⁹⁹ Eternally rolls the wheel of being.²⁰⁰ Everything dies, everything blossoms again.²⁰¹ Eternally runs the year of being.²⁰² The ring of existence stays true to itself.²⁰³ It is beautiful, and it is what the dwarf said at the gate with the contempt taken out. A wheel, a ring, a fact about the cosmos. Zarathustra hears it and smiles, and calls them rogues and barrel organs.²⁰⁴ He is telling them they have turned the thing that just knocked him down for a week into a tune that anyone can crank out.²⁰⁵

Then he tells them what it was, and this is the confession the whole book has been walking toward. The great disgust at man, he says, that is what throttled me and had crept into my gullet.²⁰⁶ And what the soothsayer said. All is alike, nothing is worth anything, knowledge chokes.²⁰⁷ There is the snake, named. The shepherd was Zarathustra, and now he says the biting in the first person.²⁰⁸ I bit its head off and spat it away from me.²⁰⁹

And there is the promise from the three metamorphoses, paid.²¹⁰ The child's list had the word forgetting in it, and the word was left alone at the time because it sounds like a licence. The cave never uses the word, so the link is made here and not by the book. But look at what he has and has not lost. He has not lost the memory of the small man, and he can describe the crowd as exactly as he ever could. What he spat out was the grudge, the need for them to be gone. That is the only forgetting the child could have meant. A creature that had merely lost its memory would be a camel again within the week, kneeling for the first rule it met. Forgetting, here, is remembering with the account closed. The woman in the meeting room never forgot that she drank. She stopped being owed anything for it, and the man beside her never did.

But what exactly was the disgust. Here the text is precise, and its precision is the argument. Naked I once saw them both, the greatest man and the smallest man.²¹¹ All too like each other, even the greatest, all too human.²¹² All too small, the greatest.²¹³ That was my weariness with man. And then the sentence his own sadness kept yawning at him, all through the sickness.²¹⁴ Eternally he returns, the man you are weary of, the small man.²¹⁵ And then his own line. And eternal return even of the smallest.²¹⁶ That was my weariness with all existence.²¹⁷ Then a cry, three times over. Nausea, nausea, nausea.²¹⁸

Set this beside what you expected. The obvious reason a person would choke on the eternal recurrence is their own worst moment coming round again, the thing you would undo, forever. That is what the two speeches before this were building, and it is what anyone would guess, and the text does not say it. What knocks Zarathustra down is the last man coming back. The crowd in the square, which laughed and asked to be made into him. Those return, eternally, and so does the smallness in the greatest.

Why that is the right answer and not a swerve. Zarathustra's whole stance toward the last man was contempt. He preached the overman as the opposite of the crowd, and when the crowd laughed he walked away. Contempt for what is below you, and a wish that it were gone, is a will that cannot make the world otherwise finding something to hate. That is the tarantula's grudge pointed downward instead of up, and a grudge is ill will against what is, because it cannot be otherwise.

So when he puts the test to himself, the test finds the one grudge he had not noticed. It was wearing the clothes of his own teaching. Will everything back, exactly as it was, forever. Everything includes the crowd. It includes the blinking, the little pleasures, the regard for health, the jeer. It includes his own failure in the square. A yes to eternity that says everything except that is a preference with a large budget. And the thought, which will not be bargained with, shows him that the disgust is in his own throat. Until he bites through it he has not said yes to anything.

A fair worry follows, which is whether he is now supposed to admire the crowd. He is not, and the difference is easiest to see on a smaller case. A music teacher has a pupil with no ear and no wish to practise. She can know exactly how bad the playing is, say so plainly, and go home untroubled. Or she can lie awake resenting that such pupils exist, and that she has to spend her life among them. Her judgment of the playing is identical on both nights. What differs is whether the pupil's existence is something she needs undone before she can be content with her own life. The first is a ranking, and the second is a grudge, and it was the second that was in his throat. After the cave the small man is still small, and Zarathustra goes on saying so. What has gone is his need for a world without him in it.

The same check can be run on anyone in a few seconds. Think of the kind of person whose mere existence irritates you, and leave out anyone who has actually wronged you. It may be the loud, or the devout, or the people who vote the other way. It may be the ones who spend their evenings on things you would never watch. Then ask whether your contentment with being alive carries a condition, which is that there should be fewer of them. If it does, you may never have noticed the condition, because it feels like taste. That condition is the snake. It is small and it is heavy, and it sits exactly where a yes would have to pass.

The book does not state that as a rule in one sentence, so it should be said what the rule rests on. His sickness has one object, the small man returning. The cure his animals prescribe is a song, and the song is a yes to eternity with no exception clause. What made him sick was the one thing his yes had left out, and what cures him is a yes that leaves nothing out. So a yes that excludes anything is still revenge.

The song comes a little later, and it closes that whole section of the book.²¹⁹ It is called The Seven Seals, and its refrain, closing every section, is one line.²²⁰ For I love you, O eternity.²²¹ Two things about the song matter for the argument. The first is that it is a report and never a resolution. Every one of its seven sections begins with the word if.²²² If ever I spread still skies above me, and flew with my own wings into my own skies.²²³ He makes no promise to love eternity. He lists what has already happened in him, and the yes follows from that, the way the child's yes follows a first movement. The second is the image he chooses for eternity. He says he has never found the woman by whom he wanted children, except this one woman he loves.²²⁴ For I love you, O eternity. Hold the word children, because the book's last page is about them.

The objection that has been waiting since the gate is a philosopher's. A thought experiment cannot redeem anything. Whether or not things return, nothing in the past changes when you say yes to it. The thing you did is as done as it ever was. The cave, the seven days, the song, all of it is a man rearranging his feelings about a stone that has not moved. The answer is that the stone was never the disease. The speech on redemption diagnosed the will's ill will toward the past, and never the past itself. Change that relation and the disease is gone, whether or not the stone moves. The objection is right that nothing in the past changes, and wrong that this is a weakness, because the book never claimed to move the stone. It claimed only that the will's hatred of the stone was the disease.

So the thought, called up, knocks Zarathustra flat, and what it finds is the one grudge he did not know he had. The snake was his disgust at the small man, biting through it was the child's forgetting, and the song that follows leaves nothing out.

So he has done it, or sung it. Two questions are owed before anyone else is brought into the cave. The first is whether what he did is any different, from the inside, from making your peace. The second is whether it could ever be asked of a person to whom something truly terrible was done.

Accepting a past means you have stopped fighting a fact you cannot change. Willing a past means that your yes to your own life no longer waits on that fact being different. That is the difference the speech on redemption promised, and this part is where it has to be paid. A fair listener can still say that the man in the cave only did what most of us were told to do with a bad memory. He made his peace with it. If that is right, the book's hardest demand is an old one with a fiercer name, and the argument has been standing on a word.

Two people with the same past are needed here, because one example only teaches the example. Each of them trained from childhood as a dancer. Each of them, at twenty-four, was hit by a car, spent two years learning to walk again, and never danced after that. It is the thing each would have given anything to undo. Both have had twenty years and a great deal of honest work since then.

The first has accepted it. She stopped arguing with it years ago. She can say, without her voice changing, that it happened and that no amount of rage will make it not have happened. She sleeps. That is a real achievement, and nothing said here is a sneer at it. An ordinary day of hers shows what that peace is made of. Those two years are a sealed room in her house, and her life is built carefully around it. She does not go to the ballet, and she changes the channel. When a friend is in hospital for months, she sends flowers and a kind message, and she does not visit. Suppose she were offered a button that erased the accident. She would lunge for it before the offer was finished.

The second woman has the same event behind her, and it is exactly as bad. She lost the one thing she had trained for, and she does not tell herself that this was for the best. But on an ordinary day she is the one people telephone when somebody faces a long time in a hospital bed. She can sit in that room for hours, because she knows to the inch what a month on your back does to a person. She goes to the ballet, and it hurts, and she goes. Offered the button, she does something the first woman did not. She stops to think, and the reason is not that the accident was secretly good. She cannot find the line where those years stop and she begins. In the end she may well press it. What matters is that she did not lunge.

Those are the two cases, and the lunge is what separates them. The music teacher gave the measure already. A grudge is a thing you need undone before you can be content with your own life. The first woman looks as though she needs nothing, because she sleeps. The button shows otherwise, since her contentment was never with her life as it is. It was with a life in which that room stays shut. The button is only a probe, and the need is the thing it finds. For the second woman the accident is part of what she is standing on when she says yes to anything at all. Her yes does not wait on the button. The button is also the gate with its direction reversed. The gate asks whether you would have it all again, and the button asks whether you need it gone.

The defence of acceptance deserves a proper hearing. You have described bad acceptance and good acceptance, its defender will say, and given the good one a harder name. Acceptance done properly means taking the past in and growing from it. The second woman is what that looks like when it is finished. Part of that is simply granted. If acceptance means the second woman, the quarrel is about a word, and the word can go to whoever wants it. But the sentence most of us were actually handed stops short at one exact place. You cannot change the past, so make your peace with it. The premise is powerlessness, and the peace is drawn from the premise. It is a treaty signed because the other side cannot be beaten. The button does one thing, which is to take that premise away. And the first woman's peace is gone in a second, because it was never peace with the event. It was peace with her own helplessness in front of it. The speech on redemption asked for something higher than all reconciliation, and that phrase now has a meaning.²²⁶ Reconciliation is the treaty. What stands higher is a yes that would survive the treaty's premise being removed.

One old school of philosophy did go further than making peace, and it should be given its due. Do not ask that things happen as you wish, it taught. Wish them to happen as they do happen.²²⁷ That is willing, and it is no mere tolerating. But the same teaching says why the wish is reasonable. The whole is administered well and justly, it says, and whatever happens is brought about by the wisest intelligence.²²⁸ That is a guarantee. It is the paymaster again, the one the virtuous were furious to lose. The book's yes is asked of someone with no such backing, who believes the car was only a car.

Which leaves the question on which the whole demand stands or falls. Why would a yes to your life have to run back through the worst of it. Why not say yes to the life and no to the accident. The answer was given at the gateway, in a sentence that may have sounded like decoration at the time. All things are knotted together so firmly that this moment drags all coming things after it.²²⁹ The knot runs backward too. This minute is what it is because of everything tied into it, and no thread comes out alone.

Most people have met this, and have said the yes without noticing they were saying it. Ask a man whose first marriage was five years of misery whether he would undo it, and he will say yes before you finish. Then remind him that he met his second wife at his divorce lawyer's office, and that his daughter exists because of that meeting. Watch his face. He has not decided that the five years were good. They were wretched, and they stay wretched. He has found that he cannot say yes to his daughter and no to the road that led to her, because it is one road.

That case is too easy, and the ease should be admitted. It has a daughter in it. The second dancer has her gift for hospital rooms. If every example pays off, then the argument is only that suffering turns out to be worth it. That is the oldest consolation there is, and it is often false. So take a third dancer, with the same car and the same two years, for whom nothing came of it. She has no gift and no daughter, only a limp and a gap in her life. The knot still holds for her, in a plainer form. She is who she is partly through those years, in the same way that she is who she is through her dull years. Nothing requires her to find them good, or useful, or a lesson. What willing them asks is only that her being glad to be here does not wait on their removal. If the button were real she might press it, and nothing said here tells her not to. The reason to want that yes is no reward. It is the running cost of the no, which the speech on redemption listed. A will that needs its past undone goes on finding things to hurt, and the stone does not move. So the claim, stated honestly, is smaller than it paid off. The no buys nothing, and it is paid for every day.

So here is the distinction stated flat. Accepting says, I would undo it if I could, and I cannot, so I will stop bleeding over it. Willing says, I am saying yes to what I am, and that yes reaches all the way back, so it goes through this too. No one is asked to look at the worst thing alone and approve it. The yes is aimed at being here, and the worst thing comes along because it is tied in.

Now the objection that has to be faced before anyone who has really suffered can believe a word of this. It is the strongest one there is, and it is stronger than anything said against the book so far. Everything means everything. It means the camps. It means the thing that was done to you as a child, if such a thing was.²³⁰ A dancer and a car are one matter. A person who says yes to a cruelty done to them, and would have it back forever, has said something monstrous. No talk about knots and threads makes that any less monstrous than it sounds.

It has to be answered on one man, because in general terms it cannot be answered at all. His father beat him through most of his childhood, and he is fifty now. First, what willing his past does not commit him to. It does not commit him to calling it good, because the book keeps every cruelty exactly as cruel.²³¹ It does not commit him to forgiving his father. It does not commit him to silence. He can say in public what was done, want it stopped wherever it is still being done, and stand between another child and another fist. There is no conflict in that. The fist that is about to fall is ahead of him and can be stopped. The grudge was only ever about the ones that have already fallen.

What it would commit him to is narrower, and harder. The speech on redemption said what a will does when it cannot move the stone. It takes revenge on whatever does not feel wrath and ill temper as it does.²³² For this man, that sentence has meant thirty years. It has meant a marriage kept at arm's length and a temper he is frightened of. It has meant his own children handled like something that might break or be broken. His father is long dead, and the beating is still deciding, every day, what kind of man he is allowed to be. Willing his life back means the beating stops casting that vote. He no longer needs his childhood to have been different before he will agree to be who he is. And if you hand him the button, he may well press it, and nobody has the standing to blame him. The claim is only about what the need costs. As long as his yes waits on a different childhood, his will is still facing the stone. That is a diagnosis, and it carries no order.

That is the answer, and it holds for a person's own past. Now the places where it stops. The first is that the book builds no fence. It never says where refusing to be owned by a cruelty ends and approving the cruelty begins.²³³ A reader who wants that line has to draw it, with no help from the text. The second goes deeper. The man can take his own childhood as part of what he stands on, because he is the one who paid for it. Nobody can do that with someone else's suffering. The man from earlier who drove drunk would press the button at once, and he should, because the person who paid was somebody else. What is asked of him is only the part that is his. It is whether he can live without first needing to have been a different man. The thought, as the book puts it, asks for everything to return, the camps included. And the only reason it offers is the knot, that this world cannot be had without that one. A listener is entitled to answer that the knot is a reason for grief, and no reason for a yes. Nothing in the book meets that answer. So the scope kept here is the first person. By the rule from the cave, a yes that leaves anything out is still a grudge. The yes defended here is therefore smaller than the book's, and it should be called smaller.

So, to gather it. Acceptance is peace with your own helplessness, and a button would end it. Willing is a yes to what you are that does not wait on the past being different, and it promises no payoff. It can be asked of a person about what they themselves paid for. The book gives no fence, and no argument that carries the yes across to other people's pain.

And that is a great deal to ask of anyone. Zarathustra managed it on the floor of a cave, after a whole book, and it took him a week. The obvious question is whether anybody else can. The last section of the book gathers the people who came closest, the ones who half understood. It puts them in his cave for one night to find out.

The people who half understand keep one need each, and one need is enough. The last section of the book brings the best of the age to Zarathustra's cave. Every one of them has seen through something and paid for it. Each has one thing left that they cannot do without. And the moment he steps out of the room, they are on their knees to a donkey. That same night one of them says the great yes aloud. In the morning Zarathustra still says these are not the companions he is waiting for. What the book does with those two scenes is easy to miss, and it is the honest end of the argument about revenge.

It starts with a cry. Zarathustra is sitting outside his cave when he hears a long, long cry that the abysses throw to one another and pass on.²³⁴ The soothsayer from the coffin dream is sitting beside him, and Zarathustra asks him a question. My last sin, the one saved up for me, do you know what it is called.²³⁵ And the soothsayer answers with one word, out of an overflowing heart. Pity.²³⁶ The German word means suffering-with. It is the word from the speech to the pitying. The soothsayer says he has come to seduce Zarathustra into that last sin, and that the cry is the higher man calling for him.²³⁷ Zarathustra goes into the woods to find whoever is crying.²³⁸

He names his own weak point out loud before the tempter uses it, and then he walks toward the cry anyway. He will do exactly the same thing again on the book's last page.

What he finds, one at a time, are the guests. Two kings who have left their kingdoms because everything at court was false and rotten and nobody knew how to revere anymore.²³⁹ The last pope, out of service, who served the old God until his last hour.²⁴⁰ The ugliest man, in a valley where even the snakes die, who Zarathustra recognises as the murderer of God.²⁴¹ A voluntary beggar preaching to cows. There are others, and these four are enough. He points each one toward his cave, and by nightfall they are all in it.²⁴²

The pattern is the same each time. A person has done the lion's work. They have said no to something enormous and meant it. And they have one need left, and the need is what keeps them a lion. A need of that kind is a condition placed on the yes, exactly as the irritating people were. I can say yes to being here, it runs, provided there is someone above me, or someone to serve, or nobody looking. A condition on the yes is what a grudge is.

The kings first. They have walked out on power, on the gilded and painted rabble of a court. And they say why they are on the road. They are looking for the higher man, the man who is higher than they are, though they are kings.²⁴³ Nobody knows how to revere anymore, they say, and they cannot stop needing something to look up to.²⁴⁴ Their one need is a height above them. You have met the kings. They got to the top of something, saw that the top was painted cardboard, and walked away from it. And they have read every new thinker since, hoping that this one will finally be someone to look up to.

The last pope. He says he served the old God until his last hour, and he tells you how God died. One day he suffocated on his all-too-great pity.²⁴⁵ His love for man became his hell and at last his death.²⁴⁶ Keep that sentence next to the soothsayer's one word. And then hear what the pope says he is now. Out of service, without a master, and yet not free.²⁴⁷ He is looking, he says, for the most pious of all those who do not believe in God, and he has come to find him.²⁴⁸ His one need is someone to serve. Without a master and yet not free is the lion, years on. He is a familiar figure too, the person who lost the faith and kept the posture. Within a year there is a new cause, or a new teacher, or a new discipline, served with exactly the old devotion. The serving was the part he could not give up.

The ugliest man is the centre of this part, and his confession is the one that names the disease. Zarathustra finds him and says, you are the murderer of God.²⁴⁹ And the ugliest man says why he did it. God saw with eyes that saw everything.²⁵⁰ He saw man's depths and dregs, all his hidden shame and ugliness. His pity knew no shame.²⁵¹ He crept into my dirtiest corners.²⁵² And then the law, in the present tense. Man cannot bear it that such a witness should live.²⁵³ On such a witness, he says, I would have revenge, or not live myself.²⁵⁴

In the book's own terms, God is the ultimate pitier, the helper whose seeing shames, the witness before whom you are always the small one. And the ugliest man could not bear being pitied, so he killed the pitier. That is revenge, the exact thing the tarantulas were made of, and it is how God dies on these two men's telling. A man who could not stand being looked at with compassion, and a God who choked on the compassion he could not stop giving. Pity killed God from both ends.²⁵⁵ There is an ordinary version of the ugliest man, and you may have been him once. Somebody saw you at your lowest, and was kind about it. You have not returned their calls since.

And then the ugliest man says a sentence to Zarathustra's face. But you yourself, warn yourself too against your pity.²⁵⁶ The murderer of God tells the teacher of the overman that his last danger is the same thing that killed God. Zarathustra knows it, has already named it, and will spend the rest of the book failing to take the advice.

The voluntary beggar, last, because he is the child gone wrong. He is found on the ground among cows on a hillside, and he wants to learn one thing from them.²⁵⁷ Chewing the cud. Unless we turn back and become as cows, he says, we shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.²⁵⁸ Ask what drove him there, and he tells you. Was it not my disgust at the richest.²⁵⁹ The same word Zarathustra choked on in the cave. He left the rich out of nausea, found the poor no better, and ended with animals that cannot disgust him. His one need is innocence, and he has bought it by going somewhere nothing can be judged. Zarathustra tells him he is doing violence to himself when he uses such hard words.²⁶⁰ The gentle preacher of cows is straining. And the cows are the counterfeit of the child. Placid, chewing the same thing over, innocent because incapable.

Now the night. They are all in the cave, they have eaten, Zarathustra has spoken to them at length, and one of them has sung a song. Then Zarathustra slips out into the open air to talk to his animals.²⁶¹ He is pleased. They are old people, he says, they recover in their own way, they laugh in their own way.²⁶² And while he is out there, he hears a sound from the cave, and it is a litany. He goes back to the entrance. And there they all are, on their knees, every one of them.²⁶³ Like children and credulous old women, praying to the donkey the kings brought with them.²⁶⁴²⁶⁵ They have all become pious again, he says, they pray, they are mad.²⁶⁶

The timing first. He slipped out. The moment the one person who could see them left the room, every one of them found a thing to kneel to. The pope who needed a master. The kings who needed a height. The ugliest man who could not bear a witness, kneeling before a beast that sees nothing. For the ugliest man the donkey is perfect, a thing to kneel to that cannot pity him. For the rest it is simply a shape to kneel to, and that was all any of them needed. The pope says so when he is asked. Better to worship God in this shape than in no shape at all.

And the litany. The donkey answers every line of it with its bray. In German the bray is written as two letters, I and A, which is the sound of the German word for yes.²⁶⁷ The animal says yes to everything.²⁶⁸ It says yes because it cannot say anything else. That is the joke, and it is a joke at the expense of the song of the seven seals. For I love you, O eternity, sung by something too stupid to refuse. Here is the yes-saying that does not cost anything, and it is the last man's yes, the one that blinks.

Now the thing the text insists on, and it is the thing you would not expect. Zarathustra does not stand in the doorway and judge them. At one point in the litany, the text says, he could no longer master himself. He cried out the donkey's yes himself, louder than the donkey, and sprang into the middle of them.²⁶⁹ Then he asks what they are doing, you grown-up children, and questions them one by one, and they justify themselves. One of the guests tells him the old God lives again, say what you like.²⁷⁰ The ugliest man turns Zarathustra's own teaching on him, that whoever wants to kill most thoroughly, laughs.²⁷¹ Zarathustra, who has just asked the pope how he can worship a donkey, lets it stand. He calls them his new friends, you strange ones, you higher men, how well I like you now.²⁷² And he ends the chapter by telling them never to forget this night and this donkey festival.²⁷³

What is he doing when he brays. The text does not explain it. The words it uses, he could no longer master himself, read as loss of control before they read as anything else. It could be helpless laughter, or mockery, or the yes of the seven seals recognising itself in a donkey and refusing to look away. This argument needs the third, and should say so, and here is why the third fits.²⁷⁴ A yes that could not laugh at its own parody would be a yes with one thing still left out. There is the yes as farce, on its knees, braying. If Zarathustra had stood above it, he would have been back in the marketplace, contemptuous of the small, and the cure would be undone. So he brays, and the scene that reads as the guests' failure is also the text testing whether the teacher has really bitten through the snake. His verdict on the festival comes afterwards, and it is gentle. Such things only convalescents invent, he says, and he takes it as a good omen.²⁷⁵ He asks them to hold the festival again, for love of him, and in remembrance of him.²⁷⁶ So he reads the kneeling as a stage in a recovery, and as nothing worse than that.

Then the night goes further than anyone in the cave expected, and the claim of this part has to survive it. They walk out together under the midnight sky, and the ugliest man, the murderer of God, speaks. Was that life, he says he will say to death. Well then. Once more.²⁷⁷ That is the yes to the return of everything. It put Zarathustra on a cave floor for a week, and here it is said aloud by the most damaged man in the book. The others rush to Zarathustra, thanking him and kissing his hands, and some laugh and some weep.²⁷⁸ On its face, this breaks the claim that the people who half understand must fail.

The ugliest man's other sentence is the one to weigh. For the sake of Zarathustra, well then, once more.²⁷⁹ It is a yes said for another man's sake, at midnight, in company, with the teacher standing beside him. The song of the seven seals set the standard for a real yes, which was a report of what had already happened in the singer. This one is a gift to a man he loves. The reading offered here is that a borrowed yes is real for as long as the lender is in the room. It should not be explained away, because the book takes it seriously. The ugliest man says that one day with Zarathustra taught him to love the earth, and that is a report of something that happened in him.²⁸⁰ The narrator says the guests became aware, all at once, of their transformation and their recovery.²⁸¹ So something real took place that night. What can be said against it is only what Zarathustra himself says the next morning.

So the best people of the age each keep one need, and left alone for a minute, they kneel.²⁸² On two of their tellings, God died of pity, from both ends. One of them can even say the great yes at midnight, for his teacher's sake. And the man who came to cure them has been warned by the murderer of God that his own last sin is the same word.

That leaves two things for the morning. One is what becomes of the midnight yes. The other is the question the ugliest man put, because the guests have their needs, and the teacher must have his. He named it once himself and heard it once from the murderer of God, and he walked toward it both times. The last chapter of the book is one morning, and in it he finds out whether he can put it down.

Zarathustra's last temptation is pity for the higher men, and the book ends the morning he puts it down. The overman never appears. The book ends with a man walking away from the only people who half understood him, toward children who have not arrived. And what the whole argument delivers, read to its last page, is the condition for making a value. It delivers the temper of the person who could make one, and no value you could live by on an ordinary day. That is the gap the book leaves, and this part says exactly where its edge is.

The morning after the donkey festival, Zarathustra springs up and comes out of the cave glowing and strong, like a morning sun out of dark mountains.²⁸³ He speaks to the sun as he did on the first page of the book, the same words. You great star, what would your happiness be if you did not have those for whom you shine.²⁸⁴ Then he looks back at the cave and says the higher men are still asleep in there, and that they are not his proper companions.²⁸⁵ He has been waiting on this mountain for someone else.

Then the sign comes. A cloud of doves, so many that he shuts his eyes.²⁸⁶ And when he reaches out, his hand goes into thick, warm, shaggy hair, and a long soft roar sounds in front of him.²⁸⁷ A lion is lying at his feet with its head on his knee.²⁸⁸ It is unwilling to leave him for love, like a dog that has found its old master. The doves are no less eager than the lion, and whenever one flits over the lion's nose, the lion shakes its head and wonders and laughs.²⁸⁹ It is read here as the lion you already know, the second animal, the one that can only say no.²⁹⁰ It arrives at the end of the book tamed by love, laughing at doves, licking the tears off Zarathustra's hands. The no has not been abolished. It has stopped being the whole of the animal.

To all of this Zarathustra says only one thing, and then goes silent. My children are near, my children.²⁹¹ His heart is loosed, and tears fall from his eyes onto his hands, and the lion licks them.²⁹²

Then the higher men wake, and come out of the cave to give him a morning greeting. They do not beg. They do not appeal to him. The lion roars, and they all cry out as with one mouth, flee back into the cave, and vanish in an instant.²⁹³ He never speaks to them again.²⁹⁴ Among the runners is the man who said once more to his whole life a few hours earlier.²⁹⁵ It would be too much to say that his yes has failed, since anyone runs from a roaring lion. What the scene shows is that the teacher lets them all go without a word, and that the yes said for his sake leaves with them. The scene is cold, and the cold is the point. There is no last plea to refuse. There is only a man, a lion, and a memory of yesterday's cry.

Because that is what tempts him. He sinks into himself, sits down on his stone, and remembers. It was for your distress, you higher men, that the old soothsayer prophesied to me yesterday.²⁹⁶ He wanted to seduce me to your distress. I come, he said, to seduce you to your last sin. To my last sin, Zarathustra says, and laughs angrily at his own word.²⁹⁷ What was saved up for me as my last sin.

Even here, at the end, he is not serene. He laughs at himself, and the laugh is angry. The man who taught that the will must say thus I willed it to everything is sitting on a rock with a lion. He is facing the thing he named to the soothsayer the day before.

The text gives it in one cry. Pity.²⁹⁸ Pity for the higher man. His face, the text says, turned to bronze.²⁹⁹ Well then, that has had its time.³⁰⁰ My suffering and my pity, what do they matter.³⁰¹ Am I striving for happiness.³⁰² I am striving for my work.

That sequence is where the argument ends. The thing he could not let go of was pity for the people in the cave. The book calls it his last sin, and it never calls it revenge. Calling it a grudge is a step taken here, and a smaller case shows why it is taken.

A father has a son who is very nearly a fine violinist. The father goes to every concert, pays for every teacher, and suffers through every failure as if it were his own. It looks like love, and most of it is. Then one day the son says he is happy as he is, teaching children in a small town. The father is wounded, because he needed the son to become something, and the son's becoming was never the father's to command. A will that needs another person to become something is standing at a familiar wall. It is the wall that faces a will which needs the past to have been different. Each is facing a thing it cannot make happen. And it does what such a will always does, which is to suffer at the person, hover over them, and be unable to leave. That is Zarathustra on the rock. He wanted his guests to make it, and he needed them to. There is a fair question here, because the speech on the pitying praised a love that wants the loved one to become more. The text sets great love above its own pity and gives no rule for when a love has sunk into pity. The rule offered here comes from that speech. The love that creates does not need the one it gives to, and the man on the rock needed them.

So he puts it down. That has had its time. And the face turns to bronze. That image is the one that stops the ending sounding like peace. He does not float free of pity. He hardens against it, the hardening is visible, and the book chose to show it.

Then the last lines. Well then, the lion has come, my children are near, Zarathustra has grown ripe, my hour has come.³⁰³ This is my morning, my day begins.³⁰⁴ Rise now, rise, you great noon. And he leaves his cave, glowing and strong, like a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains.³⁰⁵ It is the picture the chapter opened with, word for word, and the book ends on it.

The children are named twice and never arrive. The book's last chapter is the announcement of their nearness, not their appearance. The overman, the creature preached in the square on the first day, is never met. One clause in a vision on a ship, a shepherd who laughed, is as close as anyone gets. And the work Zarathustra strides out to do is not begun.

Now the verdict, and it has to be earned by the text, so here is what the text does and does not do.

A listener may fairly ask whether he gives no commandments at all, and he does. Late in the book there is a long speech called On Old and New Tablets, and near its end he sets one up.³⁰⁶ This new tablet, my brothers, I set over you.³⁰⁷ Become hard.³⁰⁸ Elsewhere he tells his listeners to give, to stay true to the earth, and to love their children's land.³⁰⁹³¹⁰ Every one of those says how to go about valuing, and almost nothing about what to value. Become hard is like being told to keep a steady hand. It is good advice for a surgeon, and no help at all in deciding whether to operate. It describes the hands of a maker, with nothing in them yet. And the same speech opens with a sentence that shows the speaker knows it. Here I sit and wait, old broken tablets around me and also new, half-written tablets.³¹¹ That is the first line of the chapter, and it frames everything after it as unfinished by the writer's own admission.³¹² When he says, here is a new tablet, the next words are a question. Where are my brothers who will carry it with me down into the valley and into hearts of flesh.³¹³ The tablet exists. What is missing is anyone to carry it.

And in the one speech where a method would go, near the start of the book, the text does not answer. The speech is called On the Way of the Creator. It asks. Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good, and hang your will over yourself as a law.³¹⁴ Can you be your own judge, and the avenger of your own law.³¹⁵ Free from what, he says, what does that matter to Zarathustra.³¹⁶ Your eye should tell me clearly, free for what. Question after question, at the exact point where a content would be stated, and no answer to any of them.³¹⁷

So the book gives the condition, which is a will with no revenge in it, and the temper, which is hardness and giving. What it never does is show a value being made.

There is one more line, from the middle of the book, that makes clear this is policy and not accident. People asked Zarathustra for the way, and he told them he had only his own, and that the way does not exist.³¹⁸ That is the whole answer to the question of how a person makes meaning from scratch. It is an honest answer. It is not the answer most people came for, and the book ends still waiting for someone to carry it further.

One more thing about this ending should be said, and it is not a philosophical point. Read cold, the last page is a man hardening his face and walking out on the only people who half understood him. He walks toward children who do not exist. At the donkey festival, standing above the kneelers would have put him back in the marketplace. Here he stands above his guests, and leaves. A reader can call that the completion of the argument. A reader can call it a portrait of someone who has talked himself out of every attachment, and the text supports both. The argument requires the first and the image insists on the second, and the book put both on the same page and did not resolve them. That is the sober reading, and it is the one taken here.

So the last thing Zarathustra had to put down was pity for the higher men. He puts it down with a bronze face and no light heart. The overman is never met and the children never arrive. The book states the temper of a creator and never shows a creation.

Which leaves you, and the question of what any of this does to a Tuesday.

The hollow feeling now has a name and a shape, and the test can be run on a life. Everything before this was the argument. This is what the argument does to the person who came in with a decent job and some people they love. The person with two or three things they would undo, and a hole under all of it.

First the skeleton, spoken once as plain steps, because a thing you cannot say back is a thing you did not get.

First the diagnosis, in three steps. The square. The comfortable modern person lives on a morality whose highest value is his own freedom from suffering. It was guaranteed by a God who is gone.³¹⁹ The dragon. That morality cannot be replaced by choosing alone, because the will at full strength is a lion, and a lion can only say no.³²⁰ The meeting room. A decision can carry you to where a value could grow, and the arrival is not yours to order. Where it never comes, something is in the way. Then the block, in three more. The patient man with a temper. What a life does when it values is overcome itself, and every table of goods is the record of a fight. The book calls that drive will to power, and its hardest case is a life commanding itself.³²¹ The spider. What blocks the drive is revenge, a will that cannot rise hurting what it cannot become. Weariness made the comfortable code, and the grudge keeps it in place.³²² The stone. Revenge, at bottom, is against time, because the will cannot go backward, and it punishes whatever is in reach.³²³ Then the test, in three. The gate. The thought of return puts the past where a will can be asked about it. It is a test and no fact, and what it measures is how much grudge is left.³²⁴ The snake. The yes is not real until it includes what you most despise.³²⁵ The button. Accepting is peace with your own helplessness. Willing is a yes to what you are that does not wait on the past being different. It can be asked only about what you yourself paid for.³²⁶ And last, where the book itself stops, in two. The donkey. The best people of the age each keep one need, and a need is a condition on the yes.³²⁷ The rock. The last thing the teacher puts down is pity, and the book ends there, with the condition for making a value and almost no value.³²⁸

That is the order the book makes them in. Now the test.

The comfort first, the thing you call maturity. You have arranged a life in which little can hurt you. Small pleasures, good health, no one above you and no one below. The book does not ask you to give any of it up. It asks one question about it. Is there anything in your life that outranks not being hurt. Anything you would put a small pleasure on the line for. If there is, you are not the last man, whatever your life looks like from outside. If there is not, then what you feel under the comfort is the hole where a value at the top of a life should be. That is the fingerprint, a defensive value sitting where a living one should be. And here is what would show that this whole account is wrong about you. Suppose something plainly does outrank your own comfort, your children, say, and the hollow is there anyway. There are two possibilities, and only you can tell which is yours. One is that the love is real and arrived, and the hollow has another cause. Then it should be looked for elsewhere, in loneliness, in exhaustion, or in an illness that has a doctor's name. The other is worth a hard look at what the love is being asked to do. If the children are what makes a life of defence bearable, the thing you guard hardest, then they have been put inside the lock. They are carrying a weight that was never theirs. The claim made here is about one cause, and it can miss.

The grudge next, if you have one. The person who got what you should have had, or the institution you would like to see brought down. The test takes one second. Would you still want what you call justice if it brought no one down. The answer says nothing about whether the arrangement you want is right. It tells you what the wanting is made of, which is the thing you can do something about.

Then the things you are against. If you once walked out of something that ran your life, you did the lion's work, and it was real. Count your values, and count how many are the negative of one you were raised with. The book does not ask you to go back, only whether anything in you has ever moved first. One thing you hold that is a reaction to nothing. If there is, that is the child, and it is the only place a value of your own can come from. If there is not, you are free and you have a desert, and both are real. Even then the will has work to do. It can carry you somewhere a value could grow, and it can look for whatever is in the way.

Then the shape you kneel to, because the guests in the cave were the best people of their age, and each had one need left. One needed somebody to look up to, and one needed somebody to serve. One could not bear to be seen, and one had gone where nothing could be judged. The way to find yours is to ask what you do in the minute when nobody whose opinion you value is in the room. And there is the borrowed yes to check for. Some yeses can only be said in certain company, at the retreat, in the meeting, beside one particular teacher. A yes like that is real while it lasts, and it is not yet yours. The test of it is an ordinary morning afterwards, alone.

Then the person you need to become something. It may be a child, a partner, a pupil, or a friend with more talent than they are using. You can want it for them with everything you have, and tell them so, and fight for it. That holds most of all when staying as they are is killing them, as with a friend who is drinking himself to death. The question is only whether your own yes is hostage to how it turns out. If it is, then part of what you call love is a wall you are standing at.

And now the things you would undo, because that is where the test bites hardest. The book ran it on Zarathustra's contempt for other people. Running it on your own past is an extension made here, and the book's own phrase, to redeem those who are past, invites it.³²⁹ The doors come first. Go through the ones you keep closed because of what happened, and ask of each whether it protects anybody. Keep those. Of the rest, ask whether opening them would feel like getting off too lightly. Those are the sentence, and by now you know who is serving it. Then the button. If you could erase the thing, would you. If you would lunge for it, you have made peace with being helpless. That peace is worth having, and the book asks for more. It asks whether you could say yes to the person standing here, and let that yes run back along everything tied into them. It would have to run through the worst of it too. That would not mean the thing was good, because every cruelty stays exactly as cruel. It would mean the thing no longer casts a vote on who you are allowed to be. You would still remember it, and you would still know what it cost.

And if you cannot say it. Then you know exactly what the snake is, in your own case, and you know that pulling does not remove it. The book offers no technique for the biting, and it never pretends to. A will can refuse, and carry, and look for the block, and none of those is the yes. It offers a man who could not do it either, for most of a book. He got there on the floor of a cave, and even then was not done.

Which is the place to say what the book does not give, plainly, so that nobody leaves with more than it holds. It gives almost no content, only the hands of a maker with nothing in them yet.³³⁰ It gives no fence between refusing to be owned by a cruelty and approving one, and its last tablet, become hard, points away from any fence.³³¹ The test for a cause made of bringing things down catches some fanatics. Nothing in the book stops one with a cause of his own from claiming the same things. He too has something above his comfort, and he too says yes to everything. It gives no argument that carries the yes across to other people's suffering. And it gives no method, beyond the slow order of learning in which nobody flies into flying.³³² Two things the book does contain have been left out of this argument, and hiding them would be a kind of lie. It has a speech praising war and courage over love of neighbour. The speech tries to make the war a war for your own thoughts, and does not fully manage it.³³³ And an old woman, at the end of a speech about women, tells Zarathustra not to forget the whip when he goes to them. The book keeps her line without comment.³³⁴ Both are in the text, and nothing here rests on either.

What it gives, in return, is a diagnosis that fits the feeling. The hollow under a decent life is a leftover morality, with its guarantee gone and comfort at the top where nothing defensive can live. A mechanism for the grudge, which turns out to be against time. A test that finds the grudge wherever it is hiding, including inside your best values. And one question that cannot be dodged, put to the exact thing you would give anything to undo.

Zarathustra was asked for the way and said the way does not exist.³³⁵ This is my way, he said.³³⁶ Where is yours. The book ends with him walking out of a cave, hard-faced, toward children who are near and have not come.³³⁷ It is an uncomfortable ending, and it was meant to be. It is the ending of a book that found the condition and stopped there, honestly, and left the rest to whoever could stand at the gate.

So here is the gate. The road behind, the road ahead, and the smallest possible point where they meet. Your whole life is coming round, with the one thing you would undo tied into it. Could you say yes.