spise the earthly hath your spirit been persuaded, but not your
bowels: these, however, are the strongest in you!

And now is your spirit ashamed to be at the service of your bowels, and
goeth by-ways and lying ways to escape its own shame.

"That would be the highest thing for me"--so saith your lying spirit
unto itself--"to gaze upon life without desire, and not like the dog,
with hanging-out tongue:

To be happy in gazing: with dead will, free from the grip and greed
of selfishness--cold and ashy-grey all over, but with intoxicated
moon-eyes!

That would be the dearest thing to me"--thus doth the seduced one seduce
himself,--"to love the earth as the moon loveth it, and with the eye
only to feel its beauty.

And this do I call IMMACULATE perception of all things: to want nothing
else from them, but to be allowed to lie before them as a mirror with a
hundred facets."--

Oh, ye sentimental dissemblers, ye covetous ones! Ye lack innocence in
your desire: and now do ye defame desiring on that account!

Verily, not as creators, as procreators, or as jubilators do ye love the
earth!

Where is innocence? Where there is will to procreation. And he who
seeketh to create beyond himself, hath for me the purest will.

Where is beauty? Where I MUST WILL with my whole Will; where I will love
and perish, that an image may not remain merely an image.

Loving and perishing: these have rhymed from eternity. Will to love:
that is to be ready also for death. Thus do I speak unto you cowards!

But now doth your emasculated ogling profess to be "contemplation!"
And that which can be examined with cowardly eyes is to be christened
"beautiful!" Oh, ye violators of noble names!

But it shall be your curse, ye immaculate ones, ye pure discerners, that
ye shall never bring forth, even though ye lie broad and teeming on the
horizon!

Verily, ye fill your mouth with noble words: and we are to believe that
your heart overfloweth, ye cozeners?

But MY words are poor, contemptible, stammering words: gladly do I pick
up what falleth from the table at your repasts.

Yet still can I say therewith the truth--to dissemblers! Yea, my
fish-bones, shells, and prickly leaves shall--tickle the noses of
dissemblers!

Bad air is always about you and your repasts: your lascivious thoughts,
your lies, and secrets are indeed in the air!

Dare only to believe in yourselves--in yourselves and in your inward
parts! He who doth not believe in hi