The Honey Offering

—And again months and years ran over Zarathustra’s soul, and he paid no heed; but his hair turned white. One day, as he sat on a stone in front of his cave and quietly gazed out,—and from there one gazes out on the sea, and away over winding abysses—his animals walked around him thoughtfully and at last placed themselves in front of him.

“O Zarathustra,” they said, “are you perhaps looking out for your happiness?”—“What does happiness matter!” he answered. “I have long ceased to strive for happiness, I strive for my work.”—“O Zarathustra,” the animals spoke again, “you say that as one who has more than enough of the good. Are you not lying in a sky-blue lake of happiness?”—“You rascally fools,” answered Zarathustra, and smiled, “how well you chose the image! But you also know that my happiness is heavy and not like a liquid wave of water: it presses on me and will not leave me and behaves like molten pitch.”—

Then the animals again walked around him thoughtfully and then once more placed themselves in front of him. “O Zarathustra,” they said, “so that is why you yourself grow ever yellower and darker, although your hair would like to look white and flaxen? Look, you are sitting in your pitch!”—“What are you saying, my animals,” said Zarathustra, and laughed as he said it, “truly, I blasphemed when I spoke of pitch. What is happening to me happens to all fruits that grow ripe. It is the honey in my veins that makes my blood thicker and my soul stiller too.”—“That must be so, O Zarathustra,” answered the animals, and pressed close to him; “but will you not climb a high mountain today? The air is pure, and today one can see more of the world than ever.”—“Yes, my animals,” he answered, “you advise well and after my own heart: today I will climb a high mountain! But see to it that honey is at hand for me there, yellow, white, good, ice-fresh golden honey from the comb. For know this: up there I want to make the honey offering.”—

But when Zarathustra was up on the summit, he sent home the animals that had escorted him, and found that he was now alone:—then he laughed with his whole heart, looked around, and spoke thus:

That I spoke of offerings and honey offerings was only a ruse of my speech and, truly, a useful folly! Up here I may speak more freely than in front of hermits’ caves and hermits’ pets.

What, offer! I squander what is given to me, I, a squanderer with a thousand hands: how could I still call that—offering!

And when I craved honey, I craved only bait and sweet syrup and slime, for which even growling bears and strange, sullen, evil birds lick their tongues:

—for the best bait, such as hunters and fishermen need. For if the world is like a dark forest of beasts and the pleasure garden of all wild hunters, still more, and more dearly, it seems to me an abysmal, rich sea,

—a sea full of brightly colored fish and crabs, for which even gods might lust, so that they would become fishermen at it and casters of nets: so rich is the world in strange things, great and small!

Especially the human world, the human sea:—toward that I now cast out my golden fishing rod and say: Open up, you human abyss!

Open up and throw me your fish and glittering crabs! With my best bait I will bait for myself today the strangest human fish!

—my happiness itself I cast out into all the wide and distant places, between sunrise, noon, and sunset, to see whether many human fish will not learn to tug and wriggle at my happiness.

Until, biting on my sharp hidden hooks, they have to come up to my height, the most colorful gudgeons of the abyss, to the most malicious of all fishers of human beings.

For that is what I am, from the ground up and from the beginning: pulling, pulling toward me, pulling upward, raising up, a puller, a breeder, and a taskmaster, who not for nothing once told himself: “Become who you are!”

So let human beings now come up to me: for I am still waiting for the signs that it is time for my going down; I myself do not yet go under, as I must, among human beings.

For this I wait here, cunning and mocking on high mountains, not an impatient one, not a patient one, rather one who has unlearned even patience,—because he no longer “suffers.”

For my fate leaves me time: has it perhaps forgotten me? Or is it sitting in the shade behind a big stone, catching flies?

And truly, I am grateful to it for this, my eternal fate, that it does not hound me and press me and leaves me time for pranks and mischief: so that today I climbed this high mountain to go fishing.

Has a human being ever caught fish on high mountains? And even if what I want and do up here is a folly: better this still than that down below I should grow solemn from waiting, and green and yellow—

—a strutting snorter of wrath from waiting, a holy howling storm from the mountains, an impatient one who shouts down into the valleys: “Listen, or I will lash you with the scourge of God!”

Not that I would bear a grudge against such wrathful ones for that: they are good enough for me to laugh at! Impatient they must be, these big noisy drums, who will have their say today or never!

But I and my fate—we do not speak to the Today, nor do we speak to the Never: for speaking we have patience and time and more than time. For one day it must come and may not pass by.

What must come one day and may not pass by? Our great Hazar, that is, our great distant human kingdom, the Zarathustra kingdom of a thousand years—

How far away may such a “far away” be? What is that to me! But it stands no less firm for me because of that—, with both feet I stand secure on this ground,

—on an eternal ground, on hard primeval rock, on this highest, hardest primeval mountain range, to which all winds come as to a weather divide, asking Where? and Where from? and Where to?

Here laugh, laugh, my bright and wholesome malice! From high mountains throw down your glittering mocking laughter! Bait for me with your glitter the most beautiful human fish!

And whatever in all seas belongs to me, my in-and-for-myself in all things—fish that out for me, bring that up to me: for that I wait, the most malicious of all fishermen.

Out, out, my fishing line! In, down, bait of my happiness! Drip your sweetest dew, honey of my heart! Bite, my hook, into the belly of all black gloom!

Out, out, my eye! Oh, how many seas all around me, what dawning human futures! And above me—what rose-red stillness! What cloudless silence!