Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

On the uses and disadvantages of history for lifesay' - but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent: so that thehuman being was left wondering.But he also wonders at himself, that he cannot learn to fo rget butclings relentlessly to the past: however far and fast he may run, thischain runs with him. And it is a matter for wonder: a moment, nowhere and then gone, nothing befo re it came, again nothing after ithas gone, nonetheless returns as a ghost and disturbs the peace of alater moment. A leafflutters from the scroll of time, floats away - andsuddenly floats back again and falls into the man's lap. Then the mansays 'I remember' and envies the animal, who at once fo rgets and fo rwhom every moment really dies, sinks back into night and fo g and isextinguished fo r ever. Thus the animal lives unhistorically: for it iscontained in the present, like a number without any awkward fractionleft over; it does not know how to dissimulate, it conceals nothingand at every instant appears wholly as what it is; it can thereforenever be anything but honest. Man, on the other hand, braces himselfagainst the great and ever greater pressure of what is past: itpushes him down or bends him sideways, it encumbers his steps as a,dark, invisible burden which he can sometimes appear to disownand which in traffic with his fellow men he is only too glad to disown,so as to excite their envy. That is why it affects him like a vision ofa lost paradise to see the herds grazing or, in closer proximity tohim, a child which, having as yet nothing of the past to shake off,plays in blissful blindness between the hedges of past and future.Ye t its play must be disturbed; all too soon it will be called out ofits state of fo rgetfulness. Then it will learn to understand thephrase 'it was ': that password which gives conflict, suffering andsatiety access to man so as to remind him what his existence fundamentallyis - an imperfect tense that can never become a perfectone. If death at last brings the desired forgetting, by that act itat the same time extinguishes the present and all existence andtherewith sets the seal on the knowledge that existence is only anuninterrupted has-been, a thing that lives by negating, consumingand contradicting itself.If happiness, if reaching out fo r new happiness, is in any sensewhat fetters living creatures to life and makes them go on living, thenperhaps no philosopher is more justified than the Cynic: fo r thehappiness of the ariimal, as the perfect Cynic, is the living proof ofthe rightness of Cynicism. The smallest happiness, if only it is presentuninterruptedly and makes happy, is incomparably more happinessthan the greatest happiness that comes only as an episode, as it werea piece of waywardness or fo lly, in a continuum of joylessness, desire61