Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely MeditationsWotan by reference to their own life and who themselves, like him,grow ever greater the fu rther they withdraw? Which of you willrenounce power, in the knowledge and experience that power isevil? Where are those who, like Brunnhilde, relinquish their wisdomout oflove and yet in the end learn from their life the highest wisdomof all: 'deepest suffering of sorrowing love opened my eyes'.' Andwhere are the free and fearless, those who in innocent selfishnessgrow and blossom out of themselves, the Siegfrieds among you?He who thus asks, and asks in vain, will have to look towards thefu ture; and if in some remote age his glance should discover preciselythat 'folk' for whom Wagner's art is a record of its own history,he will also have finally come to understand what Wagner will be to thisfolk: something he can not be to any of us, namely not the seer of afu ture, as he would perhaps like to appear to us, but the interpreterand transfigurer of a past.*Words of Briinnhilde in one of the many different versions Wagner wrote of theclosing scene of Giitterdiimmerung: not in th e final version set to music, but included ina passage appended as a fo otnote to the sce in the 1872 edition of the Ringtext.254