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life and the search for ‘pure knowledge’; 16: critique of the scholarly life; 17: critique of the artistic nature; 18: dramatically, the book’s turning-point. A discourse on revolution and anarchism is allied to an uncommon amount of action and a fantastical story told by sailors. Zarathustra’s disciples ‘hardly listened’ to his discourse, we are told, because of their anxiety to repeat the sailors’ story, the point of which is that Zarathustra’s alter ego has been seen flying through the air crying ‘It is time! It is high time!’ ‘For what is it high time?’ Zarathustra asks himself when he learns this: the answer (suppressed for the moment but henceforward never absent from his mind) is: ‘Time to declare the eternal recurrence.’; 19: continues the fantastical atmosphere of 18 and intensifies it into nightmare; Zarathustra is now in a nervous and depressed condition very different from the state of ebullient optimism which has chiefly characterized him hitherto; a ‘dark night of the soul’, which persists into Part Three; 20: a discourse on ‘great men’ leads to reflexions on the nature of will in the midst of which Zarathustra is struck dumb when he realizes the implications of what he is saying for the theory of eternal recurrence; 21: on the desirability of masks – a beautifully shaped chapter, in this respect perhaps the finest; but it belongs in spirit earlier in the book, it interrupts the steady descent from 18 to 22, in which Zarathustra, as the consequence of a second nightmare which robs him of all self-confidence and almost of self-control, again deserts his disciples, this time, however, in a mood of profound misery, and this time for good.
    PART THREE. For the most part Zarathustra is alone and addressing himself. Earlier themes are taken up and woven into a texture which sometimes grows too tight. Imagery becomesclotted at times. But the intensity of expression aimed at is superbly achieved and maintained.
    1: Zarathustra has just left his disciples and is making his way home, his depression still upon him; 2: on board ship, he expounds the eternal recurrence as a riddle and in language which recalles the nightmare of Part Two 18; although all is still shrouded in obscurity and mystery, that he has now brought himself to raise the veil even to this limited extent is sufficient to restore him to his normal cheerfulness; 3 and 4: prose poems, introspective, cheerful, calm; half way between the melancholy of Part Two 9–11 and the Dionysian ecstasy of Part Three 14–16; 5: back on firm land, Zarathustra experiences again his familiar nausea at mankind; 6: self-portrait of Zarathustra as a solitary; 7: extended exegesis of the text ‘May looking away be my only form of negation!’; 8: polemic against piety; 9: Zarathustra arrives back at his cave: a hymn to solitude; 10: a model ‘revaluation’ of three vices; n: exhortation to cheerfulness; 12–16: the climax of the book, a supreme exhibition of the sustained intellectual passion which gives Nietzsche his place among the world’s great men. 12 is a re-exposition in brief of Zarathustra’s teachings, up to but not including the theory of the eternal recurrence, which is reserved for 13, in which the theory is at last stated in full and without disguise, and joyfully accepted and embraced. With this act Zarathustra’s self-education reaches its appointed end. The fulfilment is celebrated with a trilogy of prose poems, 14–16, of great exuberance and intensity. At this culmination of his course, Zarathustra is, as aforesaid, entirely alone, so that when he wishes to give vent to his feelings of unbounded joy and gratitude in dithyrambic poetry there is no one to whom he can address these dithyrambs except himself. Thus 14 is addressed to his own soul, 15 to the life he feels within him, 16 to himself in his future reincarnation. The eternity referred to in 16 is of course the eternal recurrence, and the child he wants to