Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

60Untimely Meditationssince it will offer to many the opportunity of paying compliments tothe said movement. And for myself I shall gain something that isworth more to me even than decorum - that is, to be publiclyinstructed and put right about the character of our own time.This meditation too is untimely, because I am here attempting tolook afresh at something of which our time is rightly proud - itscultivation of historyas being injurious to it, a defect anddeficiency in it; because I believe, indeed, that we are all sufferingfrom a consuming fever of history and ought at least to recognizethat we are suffering from it. But if Goethe was right to assert thatwhen we cultivate our virtues we at the same time cultivate our faults,and if, as everyone knows, a hypertrophied virtuesuch as the historicalsense of our age appears to be - can ruin a nation just as effectivelyas a hypertrophied vice: then there can be no harm inindulging me for this once. And it may partly exonerate me when Igive an assurance that the experiences which evoked those tormentingfeelings were mostly my own and that I have drawn on the experiencesof others only fo r purposes of comparis(JJl; and further, that it is onlyto the extent that I am a pupil of earlier times, especially theHellenic, that though a child of the present time I was able to acquiresuch untimely experiences. That much, however, I must concede tomyself on account of my profession as a classicist: for I do not knowwhat meaning classical studies could have for our time if they werenot untimely - that is to say, acting counter to our time and therebyacting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time tocome.Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not knowwhat is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest,leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day,fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thusneither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see;for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he ishuman, he cannot help envying them their happiness - what theyhave, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yethe cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal. A humanbeing may well ask an animal: 'Why do you not speak to me of yourhappiness but only stand and gaze at me?' The animal would like toanswer, and say: 'The reason is I always forget what I was going to