On the Mount of Olives

Winter, a bad guest, sits at home with me; my hands are blue from the handshake of his friendship.

I honor him, this bad guest, but I like to leave him sitting alone. I like to run away from him; and if one runs well, one escapes him!

With warm feet and warm thoughts I run to where the wind stands still—to the sunny corner of my Mount of Olives.

There I laugh at my stern guest and am still fond of him, because at home he catches the flies for me and silences much small noise.

For he does not tolerate it when a gnat wants to sing, let alone two; he makes even the lane lonely, so that the moonlight in it is afraid at night.

He is a hard guest—but I honor him, and I do not pray, like the softlings, to the potbellied fire-idol.

Better a little teeth-chattering than worshiping idols!—so my nature will have it. And I bear a special grudge against all rutting, steaming, musty fire-idols.

Whom I love, I love better in winter than in summer; I mock my enemies better now, and more heartily, since winter has been sitting in my house.

Heartily, truly, even when I crawl into bed—: even then my hidden happiness laughs and makes mischief; even my lying dream laughs.

I—a crawler? Never in my life have I crawled before the powerful; and if I ever lied, I lied out of love. That is why I am glad even in my winter bed.

A humble bed warms me more than a rich one, for I am jealous of my poverty. And in winter it is most faithful to me.

I begin every day with a piece of malice: I mock the winter with a cold bath: at that my stern housemate grumbles.

I also like to tickle him with a little wax candle: so that at last he will let the sky out for me from the ash-gray dusk.

For I am especially malicious in the morning: at the early hour when the bucket clanks at the well and the horses neigh warmly through gray lanes:—

Impatiently I wait then for the bright sky at last to rise for me, the snow-bearded winter sky, the old man and white-head—

—the winter sky, the silent one, which often keeps silent even about its sun!

Did I learn the long bright silence from him, perhaps? Or did he learn it from me? Or did each of us invent it himself?

The origin of all good things is thousandfold—all good, mischievous things leap into existence for joy: how should they always do that only—once!

A good, mischievous thing is long silence too, and to look out, like the winter sky, from a bright, round-eyed face:—

—like it, to keep silent about one’s sun and one’s unbending sun-will: truly, this art and this winter mischief I have learned well!

It is my dearest malice and art that my silence has learned not to betray itself by silence.

Rattling with words and dice, I outwit the solemn watchers: from all these stern spies my will and purpose shall slip away.

So that no one may look down into my ground and my last will—for that I invented the long bright silence.

Many a clever man I found who veiled his face and muddied his water, so that no one might see through him and down into him.

But it was precisely to him that the cleverer mistrusters and nutcrackers came: it was precisely his most hidden fish that was fished out!

But the bright, the brave, the transparent—these are to me the cleverest of the silent: their ground is so deep that even the brightest water does not—betray it.—

You snow-bearded, silent winter sky, you round-eyed white-head above me! O you heavenly image of my soul and its mischief!

And must I not hide myself, like one who has swallowed gold—so that they do not slit my soul open?

Must I not wear stilts, so that they overlook my long legs—all these envy-mongers and misery-fanciers around me?

These smoky, room-warm, used-up, moldy, fretted souls—how could their envy bear my happiness!

So I show them only the ice and winter on my peaks—and not that my mountain still winds all the belts of the sun around itself!

They hear only my winter storms whistling: and not that I also sail over warm seas, like longing, heavy, hot south winds.

They even pity my mishaps and accidents:—but my word is: “Let chance come to me: it is innocent, like a little child!”

How could they bear my happiness if I did not lay mishaps and winter hardships and polar-bear caps and snow-sky cloaks around my happiness!

—if I did not myself have mercy on their pity—the pity of these envy-mongers and misery-fanciers!

—if I did not myself sigh and shiver with frost before them and let myself be patiently wrapped in their pity!

This is the wise mischief and goodwill of my soul, that it does not hide its winter and its frost storms; it does not hide its chilblains either.

One man’s solitude is the flight of the sick; another’s solitude is the flight from the sick.

Let them hear me chatter and sigh with the winter cold, all these poor, squinting rogues around me! With such sighing and chattering I still flee from their heated rooms.

Let them pity me and sigh over me for my chilblains: “He will yet freeze to death on the ice of knowledge!”—so they lament.

Meanwhile I run with warm feet this way and that on my Mount of Olives: in the sunny corner of my Mount of Olives I sing and mock all pity.—

Thus sang Zarathustra.