opportunity and provocation to constant MISUNDERSTANDING. To be able to
allow oneself this veritable luxury of taste and morality, one must
not live among intellectual imbeciles, but rather among men whose
misunderstandings and mistakes amuse by their refinement--or one will
have to pay dearly for it!--"He praises me, THEREFORE he acknowledges me
to be right"--this asinine method of inference spoils half of the life
of us recluses, for it brings the asses into our neighbourhood and
friendship.

284. To live in a vast and proud tranquility; always beyond... To have,
or not to have, one's emotions, one's For and Against, according to
choice; to lower oneself to them for hours; to SEAT oneself on them as
upon horses, and often as upon asses:--for one must know how to make
use of their stupidity as well as of their fire. To conserve one's
three hundred foregrounds; also one's black spectacles: for there are
circumstances when nobody must look into our eyes, still less into our
"motives." And to choose for company that roguish and cheerful vice,
politeness. And to remain master of one's four virtues, courage,
insight, sympathy, and solitude. For solitude is a virtue with us, as
a sublime bent and bias to purity, which divines that in the contact of
man and man--"in society"--it must be unavoidably impure. All society
makes one somehow, somewhere, or sometime--"commonplace."

285. The greatest events and thoughts--the greatest thoughts, however,
are the greatest events--are longest in being comprehended: the
generations which are contemporary with them do not EXPERIENCE such
events--they live past them. Something happens there as in the realm of
stars. The light of the furthest stars is longest in reaching man; and
before it has arrived man DENIES--that there are stars there. "How
many centuries does a mind require to be understood?"--that is also a
standard, one also makes a gradation of rank and an etiquette therewith,
such as is necessary for mind and for star.

286. "Here is the prospect free, the mind exalted." [FOOTNOTE: Goethe's
"Faust," Part II, Act V. The words of Dr. Marianus.]--But there is a
reverse kind of man, who is also upon a height, and has also a free
prospect--but looks DOWNWARDS.

287. What is noble? What does the word "noble" still mean for us
nowadays? How does the noble man betray himself, how is he recognized
under this heavy overcast sky of the commencing plebeianism, by which
everything is rende