Part 4 of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra begins with Zarathustra ascending a mountain accompanied by his animals - a serpent and an eagle. '[T]ake care that I have honey ready to hand there,' he says, 'yellow, white, fine, ice-cool golden honey in the comb. For I intend to offer the honey offering.' When he reaches the summit, however, he sends the animals away, laughs, and says:
That I spoke of offerings and honey offerings was merely a ruse and, truly, a useful piece of folly! Up here I can speak more freely than before hermits' caves and hermits' pets.
Offer - what? I squander what is given me, I, a squanderer with a thousand hands: how could I call that - an offering!
And when I desired honey, I desired only bait and sweet syrup and gum, which even bears and strange, sullen, wicked birds are greedy for:
the finest bait, such as huntsmen and fishermen need. For although the world is like a dark animal-jungle and a pleasure-ground for all wild huntsmen, it seems to me rather and preferably an unfathomable, rich sea,
a sea full of many-coloured fishes and crabs for which even the gods might long and become fishers and casters of nets: so rich is the world in strange things great and small!
Especially the human world, the human sea: now I cast my golden fishing-rod into it and say: Open up, human abyss!
Open up and throw me your fishes and glistening crabs! With my finest bait shall I bait today the strangest human fish!
My happiness itself shall I cast far and wide, between sunrise, noontide, and sunset, to see if many human fishes will not learn to kick and tug at my happiness,
until they, biting on my sharp, hidden hooks, have to come up to my height, the most multi-coloured groundlings of the abyss to the most wicked of all fishers of men,
For I am he, from the heart and from the beginning, drawing, drawing towards me, drawing up to me, raising up, a drawer, trainer, and taskmaker who once bade himself, and not in vain: 'Become what you are!'
A Honey-Offering [By Merdal at
tr.wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/ copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons. org/ licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0
(http://creativecommons. org/ licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], from Wikimedia Commons.
Now I have learned to pin a wiggling maggot onto a hook I am interested in bait. I was startled to read the savagery of this very small episode on page 167 of 'To the Lighthouse' by Virgina Woolf:
ReplyDelete[Macalister's boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. the mutilated body (it was alive still) was thrown back into the sea.]
There is something strange about this episode - it is a comment on savagery and it is followed by Lily Briscoe"s cry of pain for Mrs Ramsay who has died.
But the observed fury of this episode is quite precise. Maybe she did not approve of fishing.
Why is it in such severe square brackets which round ones in the middle?