Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsof all and in the end is victorious, but who is ill-rewarded ' for it or notrewarded at all. Then, when he has done, he is turned to stone, likethe prince in Gozzi's Re coroo, but stands in a noble posture and withgenerous gestures. He is remembered and is celebrated as a hero;his will, mortified a whole life long by effort and labour, ill successand the world's ingratitude, is extinguished in Nirvana.'* Such aheroic life, to be sure, together with the mortification accomplishedin it, corresponds least of all to the paltry conception of those whomake the most noise about it, celebrate festivals to the memory ofgreat men, and believe that great men are great in the same way asthey are little, as it were through a gift and for their own satisfactionor by a mechanical operation and in blind obedience to this innercompulsion: so that he who has not received this gift, or does not feelthis compulsion, has the same right to be little as the other has to begreat. But being gifted or being compelled are contemptible wordsdesigned to enable one to ignore an inner admonition, slanders onhim who has paid heed to this admonition, that is to say on the greatman; he least of all lets himself be given gijts or be compelled heknows as well as any little man how to take life easily and how soft thebed is on which he could lie down ifhis attitude towards himself andhis fellow men were that of the majority: for the objective of allhuman arrangements is through distracting one's thoughts to ceaseto be aware oflife. Why does he desire the oppositeto be aware preciselyoflife, that is to say to suffer from life - so strongly? Because herealizes that he is in danger of being cheated out of himself, and thata kind of agreement exists to kidnap him out of his own cave. Thenhe bestirs himself, pricks up his ears, and resolves: '1 will remain myown!' It is a dreadful resolve; only gradually does he grasp that fact.For now he will have to descend into the depths of existence with astring of curious questions on his lips: why do I live? what lesson haveI to learn from life? how have I become what I am and why do I sufferfrom being what I am? He torments himself, and sees how noone else does as he does, but how the hands of his fellow men are,rather, passionately stretched out to the fantastic events portrayed inthe theatre of politics, or how they strut about in a hundred masquerades,as youths, men, greybeards, fathers, citizens, priests, officials,merchants, mindful solely of their collective comedy and*From Schopenhauer's Parerga und Paralipomena: 'Nachtrage zur Lehre von derBt:iahung und Verneinung des Willens zum Leben'.154