Human, All-Too-Human: A Book For Free Spirits; Part II

Non-Assertion of our Rights. – The exertion of power is laborious and demands courage. That is why so many do not assert their most valid rights, because their rights are a kind of power, and they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise them. Indulgence and patience are the names given to the virtues that cloak these faults.

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Bearers of Light. – In Society there would be no sunshine if the born flatterers (I mean the so-called amiable people) did not bring some in with them.

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When most Benevolent. – When a man has been highly honoured and has eaten a little, he is most benevolent.

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To the Light. – Men press forward to the light not in order to see better but to shine better. – The person before whom we shine we gladly allow to be called a light.

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The Hypochondriac. – The hypochondriac is a man who has just enough intellect and pleasure in the intellect to take his sorrows, his losses, and his mistakes seriously. But the field on which he grazes is too small: he crops it so close that in the end he has to look for single stalks. Thus he finally becomes envious and avaricious – and only then is he unbearable.

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Giving in Return. – Hesiod advises us to give the neighbour who has helped us good measure and, if possible, fuller measure in return, as soon as we have the power. For this is where the neighbour's pleasure comes in, since his former benevolence brings him interest. Moreover, he who gives in return also has his pleasure, inasmuch as, by giving a little more than he got, he redeems the slight humiliation of being compelled to seek aid.

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More subtle than Is Necessary. – Our sense of observation for how far others perceive our weaknesses is far more subtle than our sense of observation for the weaknesses of others. It follows that the first-named sense is more subtle than is necessary.

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A Kind of Bright Shadows. – Close to the nocturnal type of man we almost regularly find, as if bound up with him, a bright soul. This is, as it were, the negative shadow cast by the former.

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Not to take Revenge. – There are so many subtle sorts of revenge that one who has occasion to take revenge can really do or omit to do what he likes. In any case, the whole world will agree, after a time, that he has avenged himself. Hence the avoidance of revenge is hardly within man's power. He must not even so much as say that he does not want to do so, since the contempt for revenge is interpreted and felt as a sublime and exquisite form of revenge. – It follows that we must do nothing superfluous.

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The Mistake of Those who Pay Homage. – Every one thinks he is paying a most agreeable compliment to a thinker when he says that he himself hit upon exactly the same idea and even upon the same expression. The thinker, however, is seldom delighted at hearing such news, nay, rather, he often becomes distrustful of his own thoughts and expressions. He silently resolves to revise both some day. If we wish to pay homage to any one, we must beware of expressing our agreement, for this puts us on the same level. – Often it is a matter of social tact to listen to an opinion as if it were not ours or even travelled beyond the limits of our own horizon – as, for example, when an old man once in a while opens the storehouse of his acquired knowledge.

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Letters. – A letter is an unannounced visit, and the postman is the intermediary of impolite surprises. Every week we ought to have one hour for receiving letters, and then go and take a bath.

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Prejudiced. – Some one said: I have been prejudiced against myself from childhood upwards, and hence I find some truth in every censure and some absurdity in every eulogy. Praise I generally value too low and blame too high.

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The Path to Equality. – A few hours of mountain-climbing make a blackguard and a saint two rather similar creatures. Weariness is the shortest path to equality and fraternity – and finally liberty is bestowed by sleep.

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Calumny. – If we begin to trace to its source a real scandalous misrepresentation, we shall rarely look for its origin in our honourable and straightforward enemies; for if they invented anything of the sort about us, they, as being our enemies, would gain no credence. Those, however, to whom for a time we have been most useful, but who, from some reason or other, may be secretly sure that they will obtain no more from us – such persons are in a position to start the ball of slander rolling. They gain credence, firstly, because it is assumed that they would invent nothing likely to do them damage; secondly, because they have learnt to know us intimately. – As a consolation, the much-slandered man may say to himself: Calumnies are diseases of others that break out in your body. They prove that Society is a (moral) organism, so that you can prescribe to yourself the cure that will in the end be useful to others.

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The Child's Kingdom of Heaven. – The happiness of a child is as much of a myth as the happiness of the Hyperboreans of whom the Greeks fabled. The Greeks supposed that, if indeed happiness dwells anywhere on our earth, it must certainly dwell as far as possible from us, perhaps over yonder at the edge of the world. Old people have the same thought – if man is at all capable of being happy, he must be happy as far as possible from our age, at the frontiers and beginnings of life. For many a man the sight of children, through the veil of this myth, is the greatest happiness that he can feel. He enters himself into the forecourt of heaven when he says, “Suffer the little children to come unto me, for of them is the kingdom of heaven.” The myth of the child's kingdom of heaven holds good, in some way or other, wherever in the modern world some sentimentality exists.

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The Impatient. – It is just the growing man who does not want things in the growing stage. He is too impatient for that. The youth will not wait until, after long study, suffering, and privation, his picture of men and things is complete. Accordingly, he confidently accepts another picture that lies ready to his hand and is recommended to him, and pins his faith to that, as if it must give him at once the lines and colours of his own painting. He presses a philosopher or a poet to his bosom, and must from that time forth perform long stretches of forced labour and renounce his own self. He learns much in the process, but he often forgets what is most worth learning and knowing – his self. He remains all his life a partisan. Ah, a vast amount of tedious work has to be done before you find your own colours, your own brush, your own canvas! – Even then you are very far from being a master in the art of life, but at least you are the boss in your own workshop.

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There are no Teachers. – As thinkers we ought only to speak of self-teaching. The instruction of the young by others is either an experiment performed upon something as yet unknown and unknowable, or else a thorough levelling process, in order to make the new member of society conform to the customs and manners that prevail for the time being. In both cases the result is accordingly unworthy of a thinker – the handiwork of parents and teachers, whom some valiantly honest person[25 - Stendhal. – Tr.] has called “nos ennemis naturels.” One day, when, as the world thinks, we have long since finished our education, we discover ourselves. Then begins the task of the thinker, and then is the time to summon him to our aid – not as a teacher, but as a self-taught man who has experience.

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Sympathy with Youth. – We are sorry when we hear that some one who is still young is losing his teeth or growing blind. If we knew all the irrevocable and hopeless feelings hidden in his whole being, how great our sorrow would be! Why do we really suffer on this account? Because youth has to continue the work we have undertaken, and every flaw and failing in its strength is likely to injure our work, that will fall into its hands. It is the sorrow at the imperfect guarantee of our immortality: or, if we only feel ourselves as executors of the human mission, it is the sorrow that this mission must pass to weaker hands than ours.

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The Ages of Life. – The comparison of the four ages of life with the four seasons of the year is a venerable piece of folly. Neither the first twenty nor the last twenty years of a life correspond to a season of the year, assuming that we are not satisfied with drawing a parallel between white hair and snow and similar colour-analogies. The first twenty years are a preparation for life in general, for the whole year of life, a sort of long New Year's Day. The last twenty review, assimilate, bring into union and harmony all that has been experienced till then: as, in a small degree, we do on every New Year's Eve with the whole past year. But in between there really lies an interval which suggests a comparison with the seasons – the time from the twentieth to the fiftieth year (to speak here of decades in the lump, while it is an understood thing that every one must refine for himself these rough outlines). Those three decades correspond to three seasons – summer, spring, and autumn. Winter human life has none, unless we like to call the (unfortunately) often intervening hard, cold, lonely, hopeless, unfruitful periods of disease the winters of man. The twenties, hot, oppressive, stormy, impetuous, exhausting years, when we praise the day in the evening, when it is over, as we wipe the sweat from our foreheads – years in which work seems to us cruel but necessary – these twenties are the summer of life. The thirties, on the other hand, are its spring-time, with the air now too warm, now too cold, ever restless and stimulating, bubbling sap, bloom of leaves, fragrance of buds everywhere, many delightful mornings and evenings, work to which the song of birds awakens us, a true work of the heart, a kind of joy in our own robustness, strengthened by the savour of hopeful anticipation. Lastly the forties, mysterious like all that is stationary, like a high, broad plateau, traversed by a fresh breeze, with a clear, cloudless sky above it, which always has the same gentle look all day and half the night – the time of harvest and cordial gaiety – that is the autumn of life.

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Women's Intellect in Modern Society. – What women nowadays think of men's intellect may be divined from the fact that in their art of adornment they think of anything but of emphasising the intellectual side of their faces or their single intellectual features. On the contrary, they conceal such traits, and understand, for example by an arrangement of their hair over their forehead, how to give themselves an appearance of vivid, eager sensuality and materialism, just when they but slightly possess those qualities. Their conviction that intellect in women frightens men goes so far that they even gladly deny the keenness of the most intellectual sense and purposely invite the reputation of short-sightedness. They think they will thereby make men more confiding. It is as if a soft, attractive twilight were spreading itself around them.

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Great and Transitory. – What moves the observer to tears is the rapturous look of happiness with which a fair young bride gazes upon her husband. We feel all the melancholy of autumn in thinking of the greatness and of the transitoriness of human happiness.

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Sense and Sacrifice. – Many a woman has the intelletto del sacrifizio,[26 - A transposition of sacrifizio dell' intelletto, the Jesuit maxim. – Tr.] and no longer enjoys life when her husband refuses to sacrifice her. With all her wit, she then no longer knows – whither? and without perceiving it, is changed from sacrificial victim to sacrificial priest.

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The Unfeminine. – “Stupid as a man,” say the women; “Cowardly as a woman,” say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine.

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Masculine and Feminine Temperament and Mortality. – That the male sex has a worse temperament than the female follows from the fact that male children have a greater mortality than female, clearly because they “leap out of their skins” more easily. Their wildness and unbearableness soon make all the bad stuff in them deadly.

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The Age of Cyclopean Building. – The democratisation of Europe is a resistless force. Even he who would stem the tide uses those very means that democratic thought first put into men's hands, and he makes these means more handy and workable. The most inveterate enemies of democracy (I mean the spirits of upheaval) seem only to exist in order, by the fear that they inspire, to drive forward the different parties faster and faster on the democratic course. Now we may well feel sorry for those who are working consciously and honourably for this future. There is something dreary and monotonous in their faces, and the grey dust seems to have been wafted into their very brains. Nevertheless, posterity may possibly some day laugh at our anxiety, and see in the democratic work of several generations what we see in the building of stone dams and walls – an activity that necessarily covers clothes and face with a great deal of dust, and perhaps unavoidably makes the workmen, too, a little dull-witted; but who would on that account desire such work undone? It seems that the democratisation of Europe is a link in the chain of those mighty prophylactic principles which are the thought of the modern era, and whereby we rise up in revolt against the Middle Ages. Now, and now only, is the age of Cyclopean building! A final security in the foundations, that the future may build on them without danger! Henceforth, an impossibility of the orchards of culture being once more destroyed overnight by wild, senseless mountain torrents! Dams and walls against barbarians, against plagues, against physical and spiritual serfdom! And all this understood at first roughly and literally, but gradually in an ever higher and more spiritual sense, so that all the principles here indicated may appear as the intellectual preparation of the highest artist in horticulture, who can only apply himself to his own task when the other is fully accomplished! – True, if we consider the long intervals of time that here lie between means and end, the great, supreme labour, straining the powers and brains of centuries, that is necessary in order to create or to provide each individual means, we must not bear too hardly upon the workers of the present when they loudly proclaim that the wall and the fence are already the end and the final goal. After all, no one yet sees the gardener and the fruit, for whose sake the fence exists.

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