The question will be raised why I should actually have related all these trivial and, judged according to ordinary standards, insignificant details. I would seem to be hurting my own cause, more particularly if I am destined to assume great tasks. I rep ly that these trivial details-diet, locality, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of self-love-are inconceivably more important than everything men have hitherto considered essential. It is just here that we must begin to learn afresh. All the things men have valued with such earnestness heretofore are not even realities; they are mere fantasies, or, more strictly speaking, lies arising from the evil instincts of diseased and, in the deepest sense, harmful natures-all the concepts, "God," "soul," "virtue, "sin," "Beyond," "truth," "eternal life." And yet men sought in them for the greatness of human nature, its "divinity. All questions of politics, of the social order, of education, have been falsified from top to bottom, because the most harmful men have been taken for great men, and because people were taught to despise the "details," more properly, the fundamentals of life. If I now compare myself with those creatures who have hitherto been honored as the first among men, the difference becomes obvious. I do not consider these so-called "first" men as human beings-for me they are the excrement of mankind, the products of disease and the instinct of revenge: they are so many monsters, rotten, utterly incurable, avenging themselves on life. . . . I would be their very opposite. It is my privilege to be extremely sensitive to any sign of healthy instincts. There is not a morbid trait in me; even in times of serious illness I have never become morbid; you will look in vain for a trace of fanaticism in my nature. No one can point out -I single moment of my life in which I have assumed either an arrogant or a pathetic attitude. Pathetic attitudes do not belong to greatness; he who needs attitudes is false. . . . Beware of all picturesque men t Life came most easily to me when it demanded the greatest labor from me. Whoever could have seen me during the seventy days of this autumn, when, without interruption, with a sense of responsibility to posterity, I performed so much work of the highest type-work no man did before or will do after m@would have noticed no sign of tension in me, but on the contrary exuberant freshness and gayety. Never have my meals been more enjoyable, never has my sleep been better. I know of no other manner of dealing with great tasks than as play: this, as a sign of greatness, is an essential prerequisite. The slightest constraint, a gloomy appearance, anv hard accent in the voice -all these things are objections to a man, but how much more to his work! . . . One must have no nerves. . . . Even to suffer from solitude is an objection-the only thing I have always suffered from is "multitude," the infinite variety of my own soul. At the absurdly tender age of seven, I already knew that no human speech would ever reach me: did any one ever see me disconsolate therefor? To-day I still possess the same affability towards everybody, I am even full of consideration for the humblest: in all this there is not an ounce of arrogance or contempt. He whom I despise divines the fact that I despise him; my mere existence angers those who have bad blood in their veins. My formula for greatness in man is amor fati: that a man should wish to have nothing altered, either in the future, the past, or for all eternity. Not only must he endure necessity, and on no account conceal it-all idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity-but he must love it. . . .
