Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra

THIRD PART. 52. LII. THE APOSTATES. (continued)

COULD they do otherwise, then would they also WILL otherwise. The half-and-half spoil every whole. That leaves become withered,--what is there to lament about that!

Let them go and fall away, O Zarathustra, and do not lament! Better even to blow amongst them with rustling winds,--

--Blow amongst those leaves, O Zarathustra, that everything WITHERED may run away from thee the faster!--

2.

"We have again become pious"--so do those apostates confess; and some of them are still too pusillanimous thus to confess.

Unto them I look into the eye,--before them I say it unto their face and unto the blush on their cheeks: Ye are those who again PRAY!

It is however a shame to pray! Not for all, but for thee, and me, and whoever hath his conscience in his head. For THEE it is a shame to pray!

Thou knowest it well: the faint-hearted devil in thee, which would fain fold its arms, and place its hands in its bosom, and take it easier:--this faint-hearted devil persuadeth thee that "there IS a God!"

THEREBY, however, dost thou belong to the light-dreading type, to whom light never permitteth repose: now must thou daily thrust thy head deeper into obscurity and vapour!

And verily, thou choosest the hour well: for just now do the nocturnal birds again fly abroad. The hour hath come for all light-dreading people, the vesper hour and leisure hour, when they do not--"take leisure."

I hear it and smell it: it hath come--their hour for hunt and procession, not indeed for a wild hunt, but for a tame, lame, snuffling, soft-treaders', soft-prayers' hunt,--

--For a hunt after susceptible simpletons: all mouse-traps for the heart have again been set! And whenever I lift a curtain, a night-moth rusheth out of it.