Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsand privation. In the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness,however, it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness:the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, thecapacity to feel unhistorically during its duration. He who cannot sinkdown on the threshold of the moment. and fo rget all the past, whocannot stand balanced like a goddess of victory without growingdizzy and afraid, will never know what happiness is worse, he willnever do anything to make others happy. Imagine the extremestpossible example of a man who did not possess the power of fo rgettingat all and who was thus condemned to see everywhere a state ofbecoming: such a man would no longer believe in his own being,would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flowingasunder in moving points and would lose himself in this stream ofbecoming: like a true pupil of Heraclitus, he would in the end hardlydare to raise his finger. Forgetting is essential to action of any kind,just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life ofeverything organic. A man who wanted to feel historically throughand through would be like one forcibly deprived of sleep, or ananimal that had to live only by rumination and ever repeatedrumination. Thus: it is possible to live almost without memory, andto live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it isaltogether impossible to live at all without forge.tting. Or, to expressmy theme even more simply: there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination,of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the livingthin whether this living thing be a man or a people or a culture.To determine this degree, and therewith the boundary at whichthe past has to be fo rgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger ofthe present, one would have to know exactly how great the plasticpower of a man, a people, a culture is: I mean by plastic power thecapacity to develop out of oneself in one's own way, to transform andincorporate into oneself what is past and foreign, to heal wounds, toreplace what has been lost, to recreate broken moulds. There arepeople who possess so little of this power that they can perish from asingle experience, from a single painful event, often and especiallyfrom a single subtle piece of injustice, like a man bleeding to deathfrom a scratch; on the other hand, there are those who are so littleaffected by the worst and most dreadful disasters, and even by theirown wicked acts, that they are able to feel tolerably well and be inpossession of a kind of clear conscience even in the midst of them orat any rate very soon afterwards. The stronger the innermost roots ofa man's nature, the more readily will he be able to assimilate and62