On the Riffraff
Life is a well of joy; but where the riffraff drink too, all fountains are poisoned.
I am fond of everything clean; but I do not like to see the grinning mouths and the thirst of the unclean.
They cast their eye down into the well: now their repulsive smile gleams up at me out of the well.
The holy water they have poisoned with their lechery; and when they called their dirty dreams joy, they poisoned even the words.
The flame grows unwilling when they lay their damp hearts on the fire; the spirit itself bubbles and smokes wherever the riffraff step up to the fire.
In their hand the fruit turns sickly sweet and overripe: their glance makes the fruit tree drop its fruit and wither at the top.
And many a one who turned away from life turned away only from the riffraff: he did not want to share well and flame and fruit with the riffraff.
And many a one who went into the desert and suffered thirst with beasts of prey merely did not want to sit around the cistern with filthy camel drivers.
And many a one who came along like an annihilator and like a hailstorm to all fields of grain wanted only to set his foot in the riffraff’s jaws and so stop up its throat.
And it is not the morsel I choked on most, to know that life itself needs enmity and dying and crosses of torture:—
But I once asked, and almost suffocated on my question: What? Does life need the riffraff too?
Are poisoned wells needed, and stinking fires, and soiled dreams, and maggots in the bread of life?
Not my hatred but my disgust gnawed hungrily at my life! Ah, I often grew weary of the spirit when I found even the riffraff full of spirit!
And I turned my back on the rulers when I saw what they now call ruling: haggling and bargaining for power—with the riffraff!
I lived among peoples of a foreign tongue with my ears stopped: so that the tongue of their haggling and their bargaining for power might remain foreign to me.
And holding my nose, I went in ill humor through all yesterday and today: truly, all yesterday and today smells foul of the scribbling riffraff!
Like a cripple who has become deaf and blind and dumb: thus I lived long, so as not to live with the riffraff of power and of the pen and of pleasure.
Laboriously my spirit climbed stairs, and cautiously; alms of joy were its refreshment; on a staff life crept along for the blind man.
What happened to me, then? How did I redeem myself from disgust? Who rejuvenated my eye? How did I fly to the height where no riffraff sit by the well any longer?
Did my disgust itself create wings for me, and powers that can sense where springs are? Truly, into the highest I had to fly to find the well of joy again!
Oh, I have found it, my brothers! Here in the highest the well of joy gushes for me! And there is a life at which no riffraff drink too!
Almost too violently you stream for me, spring of joy! And often you empty the cup again by wanting to fill it!
And I must still learn to approach you more modestly: all too violently my heart still streams toward you:—
My heart, on which my summer burns, short, hot, melancholy, overblissful: how my summer heart longs for your coolness!
Gone the lingering gloom of my spring! Past the malice of my snowflakes in June! I have become summer entirely, and summer noon!
A summer in the highest with cold springs and blissful stillness: oh come, my friends, so that the stillness may grow more blissful still! For this is our height and our home: too high and steep we dwell here for all the unclean and their thirst. Just cast your clean eyes into the well of my joy, you friends! How should it grow cloudy from that! It shall laugh back at you with its cleanness.
On the tree Future we build our nest; eagles shall bring food to us solitary ones in their beaks!
Truly, no food that the unclean could share! They would think they were eating fire and would burn their mouths!
Truly, no homes do we keep ready here for the unclean! An ice cave our happiness would be to their bodies and to their spirits!
And like strong winds we want to live above them, neighbors to the eagles, neighbors to the snow, neighbors to the sun: thus live strong winds.
And like a wind I will one day blow among them yet and with my spirit take away the breath of their spirit: so my future wills it.
Truly, a strong wind is Zarathustra to all lowlands; and this counsel he gives his enemies and all that spits and spews: beware of spitting against the wind!
Thus spoke Zarathustra.