The Great Wall of China
Page 11
THE COLLECTED APHORISMS
1
The true way leads along a tight-rope, which is not stretched aloft but just above the ground. It seems designed more to trip one than to be walked along.
2
All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking-off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue.
3
There are two cardinal human sins from which all others derive: impatience and indolence. Because of impatience they were expelled from Paradise, because of indolence they do not return. But perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.
4
Many shades of the departed are occupied solely in licking the waves of the river of death because it comes from our direction and still has the salty taste of our seas. Then the river rears up in disgust, flows the opposite way, and washes the dead back into life. They however are happy, sing songs of thanksgiving, and stroke the indignant stream.
5
Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.
6
The decisive moment in the development of mankind is everlasting. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things to be of no account are in the right, for nothing has yet occurred.
7
One of Evil’s most effective means of seduction is the challenge to battle.
It is like the battle with women, which ends in bed.
8/9
An evil-smelling bitch, producer of countless litters and already decaying in places, though in my childhood it meant everything to me, which follows me faithfully all the time, which I cannot bring myself to beat, but instead retreat from step by step, unable even to stand its breath; and yet it will drive me, unless I determine otherwise, into the corner that I can already see looming up, where it will decompose wholly, upon me and along with me, with the purulent and wormy flesh of its tongue – is this an honour for me? – upon my hand to the very end.
10
A. is very puffed up, he thinks he is far advanced in goodness, since he – evidently as an increasingly seductive object – feels himself exposed to ever more temptations from directions that were previously quite unknown to him. But the correct explanation is this, that a great devil has entered into him, and the countless smaller devils are coming along to serve the great one.
11/12
The different views that one can have, say, of an apple: the view of the little boy, who has to crane his neck so that he can just glimpse the apple on the table-top, and the view of the master of the house, who takes the apple and freely hands it to his companion at the table.
13
A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life seems unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one begs to be moved out of the old cell, which one hates, into a new one which one must first learn to hate. One is also moved by a certain residual faith that, during transport, the master will happen to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: ‘This man is not to be locked up again. He comes to me.’
14
If you were walking across a plain, had every intention of advancing and still went backwards, then it would be a desperate matter; but since you are clambering up a steep slope, about as steep as you yourself are when seen from below, your backward movement can only be caused by the nature of the ground, and you need not despair.
15
Like a path in autumn: scarcely has it been swept clear when it is once more covered with dry leaves.
16
A cage went in search of a bird.
17
This is a place where I never was before: one’s breath comes differently, more dazzling than the sun is the radiance of a star beside it.
18
If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing up it, it would have been permitted.
19
Do not let evil make you believe you can keep secrets from it.
20
Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial vessels dry; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance and it becomes a part of the ceremony.
21
As firmly as the hand grips the stone. But it grips it firmly only to fling it away the further. But the way leads into those distances too.
22
You are the task. No pupil far and wide.
23
From the true antagonist boundless courage flows into you.
24
What it means to grasp the good fortune that the ground on which you stand cannot be greater than what is covered by your two feet.
25
How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?
26
There are countless hiding-places, there is only one deliverance, but possibilities of deliverance are again as many as the hiding-places.
There is a goal, but no way; what we call a way is hesitation.
27
To perform the negative is what is still required of us, the positive is already ours.
28
When one has once given Evil a lodging, it no longer demands that one believe it.
29
The ulterior motives with which you give Evil a lodging are not your own but those of Evil.
The beast wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master’s whip-lash.
30
The Good is in a certain sense comfortless.
31
Self-control is something for which I do not strive. Self-control means: wanting to work effectively at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence. But if I must draw such circles round me, then it will be better for me to do it passively, merely gaping in wonder at the immense complex, and just take home with me the strength which this spectacle, e contrario, provides.
32
The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows.
33
Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross; in this they are at one with their antagonists.
34
His exhaustion is that of a gladiator after the fight, his work was the whitewashing of one corner in a clerk’s office.
35
There is no having, only a being, only a state of being that craves the last breath, craves suffocation.
36
Previously I did not understand why I got no answer to my question, today I do not understand how I could believe I was capable of asking. But I didn’t really believe, I only asked.
37
His answer to the assertion that, while he might perhaps have possessions, he had no being, was only a trembling and a beating of heart.
38
There was one who was astonished how easily he moved along the road of eternity; the fact is that he was racing along it downhill.
39
One cannot pay Evil in instalments – and one tries to do so continuously.
It is conceivable that Alexander the Great, despite the military successes of his youth, despite the excellent army that he had trained, despite the powers capable of transforming the world that he felt within him, might have halted at the Hellespont and never have crossed it, and this not from fear, not from irresolution, not from weakness of will, but from force of gravity.
39a
The way is infinite, there is nothing that can be subtracted, nothing that can be added, and yet everyone holds up to it his own childish yardstick. ‘Truly, this yard of the way you must go as well, it shall not be denied you.’
40
It is
only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgement by that name; in fact it is a permanent court-martial.
41
The disproportion in the world seems, comfortingly enough, to be only an arithmetical one.
42
Letting the head that is filled with disgust and hate sink on one’s breast.
43
As yet the hounds are still playing in the courtyard, but their prey will not escape, however fast it may already be charging through the forest.
44
Laughable is the way you have put yourself in harness for this world.
45
The more horses you put to the job, the faster it goes – that is to say, not the tearing of the block out of its base, which is impossible, but the tearing apart of the straps and as a result the gay empty ride.
46
The world ‘sein’ means two things in German: ‘being’ and ‘belonging-to-him’.
47
They were given the choice of becoming kings or the kings’ messengers. As is the way with children, they all wanted to be messengers. That is why there are only messengers, they charge through the world and, since there are no kings, call out their now meaningless messages to one another. Gladly would they put an end to their miserable life, but they dare not do so because of their oath of allegiance.
48
To believe in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made. That would be no real act of belief.
49
A. is a virtuoso and heaven is his witness.
50
Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible within himself, though both the indestructible element and also the trust may remain permanently concealed from him. One of the ways in which this lasting concealment can express itself is faith in a personal god.
51
The mediation of the snake was necessary: Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.
52
In the struggle between yourself and the world, second the world.
53
One must defraud no one, not even the world of its victory.
54
There is nothing other than a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the evil in the spiritual world, and what we call evil is only a necessity of a moment in our eternal development.
With the strongest of lights one can dissolve the world. For weak eyes it becomes solid, for weaker eyes it acquires fists, for eyes still weaker it becomes shamefaced and smashes him who dares to look upon it.
55
All is fraud: to seek the minimum of illusion, to remain at the normal level, to seek the maximum. In the first case one defrauds the Good, by trying to make it too easy for oneself to get it, and Evil by setting it too unfavourable terms of combat. In the second case one defrauds the Good by not striving for it even in earthly terms. In the third case one defrauds the Good by moving as far away from it as possible, and Evil by hoping to make it powerless through intensifying it to the utmost. What would therefore seem preferable is the second case, for the Good is defrauded in any case, while in this case, apparently at least, Evil is not.
56
There are questions we could never get over if we were not dispensed from them by our very nature.
57
For everything outside the phenomenal world language can only be used allusively, but never even approximately by way of comparison, since, corresponding as it does to the phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relations.
58
One lies as little as possible only when one lies as little as possible, not when one has the least possible opportunity for doing so.
59
A stair that has not been deeply hollowed by footsteps is, from its own point of view, merely something that has been bleakly put together out of wood.
60
Whoever renounces the world must love all men, for he renounces their world too. He thus begins to have some inkling of the true nature of man, which cannot but be loved, provided that one is worthy of it.
61
Whoever in this world loves his neighbour does no greater and no lesser wrong than whoever in this world loves himself. There remains only the question whether the former is possible.
62
The fact that there is nothing else but a spiritual world deprives us of our hope and gives us our certainty.
63
Our art consists in being dazzled by the truth: The light upon the grotesque mask as it shrinks back is true, and nothing else.
64/65
The expulsion from Paradise is in its main aspect eternal: Thus it is true that expulsion from Paradise is final and life in the world unavoidable, yet despite that the eternal nature of the event not only gives us the possibility of remaining in Paradise permanently, but it means that we may in fact be permanently there, no matter whether we know it here or not.
66
He is a free and secure citizen of the earth, for he is attached to a chain that is long enough to give him the freedom of all earthly realms, and yet not long enough for anything to pull him over the earth’s borders. At the same time, however, he is a free and secure citizen of heaven, for he is also attached to a similarly calculated heavenly chain. Thus if he wants to get down to earth, he is choked by the collar of heaven; if he wants to get up to heaven, by the collar of earth. And despite this he has every possibility and is aware of the fact; indeed he even refuses to attribute the whole thing to a mistake in the original chaining.
67
He runs after facts like a beginner learning to skate, who is furthermore practising somewhere where it is forbidden.
68
What is more cheerful than the belief in a household god!
69
In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.
70/71
The Indestructible is one; it is each individual human being and at the same time it is common to all, hence the unparalleled strength of the bonds that unite mankind.
72
In one and the same man there are perceptions which despite total dissimilarity have an identical object, so that one can only conclude that there are different subjects in one and the same man.
73
He devours crumbs that fall from his own table; this means that he is indeed better satisfied than anyone else for a while, but he forgets how to eat at the table itself: but this means that there are then no more crumbs either.
74