Every
profound spirit needs a mask; nay, more, around every profound spirit there
continually grows a mask, owing to the constantly false, that is to say,
SUPERFICIAL interpretation of every word he utters, every step he takes, every
sign of life he manifests.
We ARE something else than "libres-penseurs,"
"liben pensatori" "free-thinkers," and whatever these
honest advocates of "modern ideas" like to call themselves. Having
been at home, or at least guests, in many realms of the spirit, having escaped
again and again from the gloomy, agreeable nooks in which preferences and
prejudices, youth, origin, the accident of men and books, or even the weariness
of travel seemed to confine us, full of malice against the seductions of dependency
which he concealed in honours, money, positions, or exaltation of the senses,
grateful even for distress and the vicissitudes of illness, because they always
free us from some rule, and its "prejudice," grateful to the God,
devil, sheep, and worm in us, inquisitive to a fault, investigators to the
point of cruelty, with unhesitating fingers for the intangible, with teeth and
stomachs for the most indigestible, ready for any business that requires
sagacity and acute senses, ready for every adventure, owing to an excess of
"free will", with anterior and posterior souls, into the ultimate
intentions of which it is difficult to pry, with foregrounds and backgrounds to
the end of which no foot may run, hidden ones under the mantles of light, appropriators,
although we resemble heirs and spendthrifts, arrangers and collectors from
morning till night, misers of our wealth and our full-crammed drawers,
economical in learning and forgetting, inventive in scheming, sometimes proud
of tables of categories, sometimes pedants, sometimes night-owls of work even
in full day, yea, if necessary, even scarecrows--and it is necessary nowadays,
that is to say, inasmuch as we are the born, sworn, jealous friends of
SOLITUDE, of our own profoundest midnight and midday solitude--such kind of men
are we, we free spirits!
(Beyond Good and Evil – chapter II) F. Nietzsche
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