“The way we feel the wind of the zeitgeist when it barely comes up as a breeze, and the arms of our mills move with it instantly, rather than waiting till the storm shakes the trees and makes the fields bow down to the earth—how proud we were of this ability of ours! How we fancied knowing, before others knew, that the time was past when one could speak about the individual and his plights in the collective of others; or that one feels as stir-crazy in the solitary confinement of any Middle Kingdom as in the terrifying capsule of the SELF; and that the knock signals sent from one to the other merely knock them apart all the more thoroughly, these individual worlds within the world; that here too the cells begin to divide and to proliferate, and the entangled circles of the individual worlds, Middle Kingdoms, and Fatherlands fall apart into monads—so that one could no longer speak about man in general, but only of the collective and the completely isolated, unconnected SELF . . . What bitter dignity haven’t we derived for ourselves from this knowledge—but have we grasped the consequences? No! The intellectual in society—or even: The artist and his subject—aren’t these ridiculously antiquated topics? . . . The sorrows of young Werther when he reached for a quill instead of a pistol—for instance, his despair about the things that tried to express themselves out of him and the things that he succeeded in expressing

as if the gods wanted to make us realize that it is not up to us to say what ought to be said, but rather that it was up to their arbitrary will to determine the time for such utterance, as if the gods wanted to force us to realize that this arbitrary will is divine in its enormous wastefulness—

for even the stupidest man, saying something that no one heeds, will sooner or later utter a basic truth, for which a Thales would envy him; something occurs at some point to even the dullest head (and then drops out again), something capable of expanding the spiritual and intellectual horizon of mankind by a good big step; in beer garden conversations, one may hear an insight that, if uttered before attentive listeners, might stamp its utterer as a genius; and in his dreams, every child surpasses Homer and Dante—

while the poor fools who feel destined to speak must earn every word in harrowings of hell until they finally reach the humble awareness that it is a matter of luck whether a crumb falls to them too from the steadily wasted and squandered opulence—

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