Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Sdwpenhauer as educatorturning inward. But what is it that assails us so frequently, what is thegnat that will not let us sleep? There are spirits all around us, everymoment of our life wants to say something to us, but we refuse to listento these spirit-voices. We are afraid that when we are alone and quietsomething will be whispered into our ear, and so we-hate quietnessand deafen ourselves with sociability.Now and again, as already said, we realize all this, and are amazedat all this vertiginous fear and haste and at the whole dreamlike conditionin which we live, which seems to have a horror of awakeningand dreams the more vividly and restlessly the closer it is to thisawakening. But we fe el at the same time that we are too weak toendure those moments of profoundest contemplation for very longand that we are not the mankind towards which all nature presses forits redemption: it is already much that we should raise our headabove the water at all, even if only a little, and observe what stream itis in which we are so deeply immersed. And even this momentaryemerging and awakening is not achieved through our own power,we have to be lifted up - and who are they who lift us?They are those true men, those who are no longer animal, the philosophers,artists and saints; nature, which never makes a leap, has made its oneleap in creating them, and a leap of joy moreover, for nature thenfeels that for the first time it has reached its goal - where it realizes ithas to unlearn having goals and that it has played the game of lifeand becoming with too high stakes. This knowledge transfiguresnature, and a gentle evening-weariness, that which men call 'beauty',reposes upon its face. That which it now utters with this transfiguredcountenance is the great enlightenment as to the character of existence;and the supreme wish that mortals can wish is lastingly and withopen ears to participate in this enlightenment. If we think of howmuch Schopenhauer for instance must have heard during the courseof his life, then we might well say to ourselves afterwards: 'Alas, yourdeaf ears, your dull head, your flickering understanding, yourshrivelled heart, all that I call mine, how I despise you! Not to be ableto fly, only to flutter! To see what is above you but not to be able toreach it! To know the way that leads to the immeasurable open prospectof the philosopher, and almost to set fo ot on it, but after a fewsteps to stagger back! And if that greatest of all wishes were fu lfilledfo r only a day, how gladly one would exchange for it all the rest oflife! To climb as high into the pure icy Alpine air as a philosopherever climbed, up to where all the mist and obscurity cease and wherethe fundamental constitution of things speaks in a voice rough and159