So Zarathustra demanded of his disciples: “Let your dying be no blasphemy of men and earth; my friends, your spirit and your virtue shall still glow in your dying, like the evening red over the earth, or else death has miserably betrayed you.”
Death our will even, our freedom—this is life’s highest meaning! Who but Nietzsche could have thought that? Of course, this is not to throw life away, when it has become hard and heavy to bear. Such a death would be of all the most unfree. It would be a flight, not a deed; it would be a lamentation and a feebleness, not a festival of the soul! But it means that we take up death from the start into the order of our life, as the night which, no less than the day, belongs to man’s full day. It means that we give to life a worth which no death can destroy, which first in death reveals its eternal power. I must die—so laments the slave, who has lived only non-entities even in his life, and has never learned that life is work, creation, consummation. I will die—so speaks the hero, to whom every fight brings the prize of a victory well worth death!—the hero who hazards his life every moment for the highest human good, who knows that he and his life have become a sacrifice from which a better, higher, freer humanity shall gain its life and its strength.
Who is ugly? Who is beautiful? Who is ashamed of his death and falsifies his deadness that it may look like life—who does this, bears death within himself as a power that drags him down, disfigures him in the fullness of that which he would be able to live. But who, in his power to die, proves that he has learned to live, has overcome the ugliest thing in man, cast it out; namely, the fear of death which creates all the lies of life, and all the servility and unfreedom of men—which creates men over whom das Gewesen! the dead past, possesses power, so that they can never breathe a joyous breath, can never commit themselves to the living and the growing. But a beautiful culture will also become a good culture because one that is living is at once good and beautiful; the eternal life of God, of whom it is said: There is none good but God alone.
Emasculating Ibsen[2]
Dear Mr. Ibsen: I hope this letter finds you well as it leeves us the same. The reason why I write you is that I seen your play called Ghosts at the Bijou Movie Theater last night and I thought it was so grand that I had to tell you. I thought it was awful the way poor Mr. Alving is always seeing that hand which was pulling his hair out of the past. And it was awful too the way poor Mr. Alving crawled across the floor on his stomich and pulled the poison offn the icebox before he killed himself. The way his poor, dear mother suffered, that was terrible. She was such a strong, brave woman that I cried for her all the time. And The Rev. Manders he was such a real swell minister that my heart was all torn watching him. It ain’t natural for everybody to be so good as ministers because they ain’t got so much time and don’t read the Bible so often. But he was certainly all there when it came to pureness and kindness. But even if the play was awful it was just grand the lesson that it taught. I sent my friend to see it and he thought it was swell. He said the kissing scenes where the terrible Cap. Alving hugs the different ladies was real stuff and that the lesson against the evils of drink was good for the young. This is what I want to write you about, Mr. Ibsen. We’re going to organize a West Side Ibsen Prohibition Club and make you honary president. I wish therefor you will write the club a letter or better if you will write a sequil to the movie play Ghosts we will put it on at the club. I know how hard it is to have movie plays accepted because I have done some myself but if you don’t write the sequil I will write it and send it to the Mutual people who put the first part on. I am certain they will take it because I will make it just so strong and powerful a sermon against the evils of drink as what you did. With best regards and hopes for your future success, I am your friend,
Mobbie Mag.
[2] P.S. For the reader: The wet nurses who minister to the mob have put our old friend Ibsen into diapers and give him to their patients to play with. The cherubic little fellow is kicking up his dimpled heels and thriving well in all the movie houses.
Death
I have always wished to know of death. I have always wondered what became of me when I went back to earth. Today I know.