To a student who wanted to know where I stood with regard to the author of Zarathustra, I replied that I had long since stopped reading him. Why? “I find him too naïve. . . .” I hold his enthusiasms, his fervors against him. He demolished so many idols only to replace them with others: a false iconoclast, with adolescent aspects and a certain virginity, a certain innocence inherent in his solitary’s career. He observed men only from a distance. Had he come closer, he could have neither conceived nor promulgated the superman, that preposterous, laughable, even grotesque chimera, a crotchet
...more
