—And there is only to add—that whether you believe these things or not, they are what you actually do. It seems to me not desirable that one's belief should be less than one's practise.
January 6th.
Has any one, at this end of the nineteenth century, a clear idea of what the poets of the ages called Inspiration? If no one have, I will describe it. With the least remainder of superstition in him a man would scarcely be able to put aside the idea that he was merely the Incarnation, the mouthpiece, the medium of overwhelming powers. The idea of Revelation in the mind describes exactly the state of affairs—that suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and fineness, something became visible and audible, something that shakes and pervades one to the depths. One hears—he does not seek; he takes—he does not ask who gives; like lightning gleams out a thought, of necessity, formed without hesitation—I have never had a choice. An ecstasy, whose colossal strain breaks in the middle with a stream of tears, in the course of which the step becomes, involuntary, now raging, now slow; a state in which one is completely beside himself, with the distinctest consciousness of countless shudderings and quiverings, even to the toes of his feet; a depth of joy in which all that is painful and somber serves, not as a contrast, but as conditioned, as demanded, as a necessary color in such an overflow of light; an instinct of rhythmic relations which overleaps vast spaces of forms; all happening in the highest degree involuntarily, but as if in a storm of sensations of freedom, of infinity, of power, of divinity.—This is my experience of Inspiration; I doubt not but that one must needs go back thousands of years to find one who might say, “It is also mine.”
Do you think that I wrote that—I, Arthur Stirling? No, I did not write that. The man who wrote that is known to you as an atheist.
January 7th.
When Zarathustra came into the next city, which lay beside the forest, he found in that place much people gathered together in the market; for they had been called that they should see a rope-dancer. And Zarathustra spoke thus unto the people:
“I teach ye the Over-man. The man is something who shall be overcome. What have ye done to overcome him?