To create such Ewigkeitsmenschen is the great goal of the new life, the prophecy of a new culture. For this new culture we need men who feel something in their own being that uplifts them above all the experience of the present, much as they may seem imprisoned therein, men who dominate life in a royal fashion, men who in confident freedom do not mind the storms which would hurl them from their path. We need men who survey the great connections of the world from peak to peak and overbridge them with their own souls, men who release destiny from its isolation and articulate it in the eternal cycle of human life, men whose own being contains all life according to its eternal substance, uttering their “yea and amen” to all that is called life as they blissfully surrender to the beauty of existence. This is the great apocalypse, life’s cryptic mystery-manual, whose seven seals the poet-prophet of this new culture, Friedrich Nietzsche, has broken.
What is yet to be? What will a day, a year, bring forth? If the eye is far-seeing and far-seeking, what will the next century bring forth? The darkness tenting like thick clouds upon the mountains of the future mystifies, and the days, the times, the years, the centuries, coerce man under the burden of all their darknesses until he is a-weary even before he has taken up his pilgrimage into the untrodden. Then there flashes from the love of eternity a clear light which kindles the light of the future: we ourselves are this light! Our existence is the cloud hanging heavily over the hills, cloud with prophetic and positive light, from which redeeming beams shall break.
Behind us lies the whole long grim past, a huge grave, with countless gravestones—the silent city of the dead which holds all that has been ever dear to the heart, all youth with their glad faces and forms, all glances of love, all divine moments. And all the dead compel all the living to conflict that the living may be controlled by life and not by death. From their graves the dead direct their deadliest shafts at the heart, at the living, to drag them down into the embrace of death. But something stirs in man that cannot be wounded, cannot be buried—man’s will. The will bursts all tombs hewn from rocks, demolishes all graves, creates resurrections out of them, smashes churches and abbeys that heaven’s pure eye may gaze through their rent roofs—the will building and bearing eternities! And who, through love of eternity, controls future and past, finds the earth quivering with new creative words, is himself such a word, even binds good and evil together, making the evilest worthy of being the sauce of life.
Ewigkeitsmensch!—the wind from the unexplored swells his sail, seafarer’s gale roaring in from the boundless. When time and space vanish from sight, vanish coasts also, the last fetters drop away: the body feels its weight and burden is past! How shall we go about rescuing ourselves from this torture and casting off this oppression?
In a strange fanatical vision, Nietzsche shows how he became an eternity-preacher, an eternity-sculptor. The vision is more novel than that of the Ascension which biblical legends narrate. The disciples of Jesus gaze upon their Master mounting heavenward into the clouds, and they hear strange words of the Christ coming down from heaven again to abide with them all the days till the end of the world. Nietzsche does not speak of the second advent of the Christ, of a recurrence of a single item of being, but of an eternal recurrence of all things, of all men, all moments and happenings of all life! Eternal return—to live life so that we would live each and all of it over again—to live it all so that it would be worth being not once but once again forever and forever—to be joint creator of a cosmos in which what is shall be fit—to be once yet again everlastingly—that is our, and Being’s, final flawless test, passing which, no Great White Throne may fill us with dismay! There is the heart’s harrowing cry: Could I but begin and live it—all over again, how different I would do! Would we like to do all that we have done over again? do them again eternally? Would we like to say and hear all the senseless prattle over again forever? Horrible thought! It were well to live and speak so that our existence can stand the fiery test of a Nietzschean eternity—live now in a way that it would be worth while to live again. It were indeed well to fill each fleeting moment of time with what is worthy to be the content of eternity. Eternity the criterion of time—that is really a great thought. To be sure, there is no eternal recurrence, and it is not clear that Nietzsche meant to say that there was. Faith in the eternal recurrence of all things, Nietzsche means this,—so at all events it seems to me,—to be a mirror in which we may recognize the true full worth of our life, a life in which there is nothing to be forgotten, nothing to be regretted, nothing done to be undone, because all is freed from the limitations of space and time and from external contingencies, and stands there in its great eternal necessity, because eternal, good, and godly even, in this necessity itself. Then we would not only live our life over again precisely as we lived it, we would live it in the light of the eternity again, ever again. No error, and folly would we then wish out of our life, because in this love of eternity it is precisely from error and folly that the truth grows which lights our faith. No weakness, no stumbling and falling, would we wish out of our life, because in the eternal illumination, power grows from all these experiences which enables us to mount above them, and gives us the victory in every bitter battle of life. No, our life is not lived from the right point of view, until we can sing it out in the song whose name is—Recurrence! We do not know the worth of the honor until we can dedicate to it that song whose meaning is: “In alle Ewigkeit!”
Ye say that a good cause will even sanctify war! I tell you, it is the good war that sanctifies every cause!—Nietzsche.
The Restaurant Violin
George Soule
(Another picture of our violinist)
A brook