Various

“ To fight and conquer this hindrance to a new culture, this is to fight and conquer death; and since death is death only through man, through his yearning or fear, the triumph of a new culture begins with the triumphal song of life, which knows how to make a festival out of even death. To be sure, Nietzsche did not set his most beautiful man over against his most ugly, but we can yet read between the lines what he conceived the most beautiful man to be. He is the man who has pushed far from him the last vestige and survival of fear and slave-service. ”

“ Man cannot endure it that such a witness should live.”
Thus spake the ugliest man. Zarathustra started off, feeling frozen to the very bowels.
The God who told men that altogether they served death, not life, that they worked deterioration, not rejuvenation—had to die! Life is a dying—and yet there shoots through the heart of man such a nameless anxiety in the presence of this dying that he paints up and pencils all death till it looks like life. And indeed many are deceived, many see only men’s rouge and mark not the great lie which it hides. ”

“ Not the wickedest, and not the wretchedest, but the ugliest man—der hässlichste Mensch—represents the power which the new culture has to struggle with—to overcome, indeed—if man is to mount to a higher plane of being.
Who is this ugliest man? Of all the Zarathustrian enigmas, this is perhaps the most enigmatic. It must have been a frightful ugliness which haunted and harried the poet-philosopher when he narrates that, amid his wanderings over men’s disappointing earth, he had met the ugliest man. Many and many were the types of human beings that Zarathustra had met in his lonely pilgrimages. ”

“ The daughter retires after being desperately kissed by the physically curious young man, and she lies awake a while wishing in moments of provoked sex that she too was married and meditating in calmer spaces upon the advantages of the family unit, the fireplace, the party calls. O, this daughter! She is the one who had the vision of beauty. She is the one whose soul sang for a day with the capacity for all the world’s lovliness. Honesty, purity, fineness burned in her with their divine radiance. The lights are turned out. Death reigns supreme. ”

“ It has no weapons with which to strike. Triumphant revolt is only for martyrs and artists. It is the losing force in normal existence.
Gradually it becomes clouded in the daughter’s soul. She feels unclean. She imagines it is the beauty which is unclean. She does not know that it is the uncleanliness of the dead—the uncleanliness of her mother revealed to her in her heart by the divine light that is dying within herself. ”

“ With this victorious song of death began a new culture, a new heroism of humanity, to which death ceased to be a pale ghost, but which confessed even in death: “as dying, and behold, we live!” Then men ceased to learn dying, and because they made no preaching of life out of dying and no vow to life, death became to them a torturing anxiety and care again ”

“ In a later profound observation, Nietzsche informs us that the ugliest man is called der historische Sinn, the historical mind, or sense, which needs decoration, accoutrement, like all ugly things that would make themselves tolerable, at least for surface people. The degenerate man,—this is the ugly man, and the saddest degeneration is the surrender of life to the past—for the past is the big grave which swallows up all that lives. Whoever makes the past the goal of his longing walks among corpses which make him shiver. He becomes himself a corpse, whose society is freezing for living men. ”

“ It is the great war of labor against capital, a struggle of life and death. In this struggle all local and theoretic differences may be safely forgotten, and all friends of labor make common cause.
I have been sent as a special delegate by some of the California unions to help organize the solidaric and militant forces of labor throughout the country. It is evident how significant this case is for the workers in general. It is imperative that they combine in solidaric unity in this vital matter, to register in mighty accents the sentiments and determination of the oppressed. ”

“ But if permanent beauty is to be preserved to human nature, efficient and high endeavor, free self-concentrated formation of character is the only means to this end. When the “outer man” mirrors goodness and beauty of heart, firmness and bravery of will, seriousness and depth of thought, his countenance glows under all circumstances with a radiance of happy beauty, and it would be a barbarian and pitiable eye indeed that could not apprehend such radiance or feel itself smitten with its glory. For the man of fine feeling, therefore, all that is ugly affects him morally at the same time. ”

“ There is a dawning of love for “impossible” things in her daughter’s heart. There is an awakened mental curiosity, a perceptible inclination to break from the oppressiveness of the surrounding dead. In the night the daughter wonders and doubts. She would like “to get away”—to go forth free of certain fiercely applied restrictions and meet a different kind of folk, a different kind of thought. She would like to be—to feel the things she is capable of. It is all vague. Always revolt is vague and intangible for the daughters of women. ”

“ The dead always know what it is they have lost. And in this knowledge the mother is strong. But the living cannot say to itself what it wishes to gain, what it reaches to attain. Only in the stray geniuses of time has the individual soul fought desperately and triumphantly for its preservation. And there is no genius in the daughter. There is merely the divine and natural instinct for self-realization. Once the mother felt it and it was killed. Now the daughter has caught the dread disease—the contamination which starts a cold sweat under the corset stays of society ”

“ You see, I have left the Countryside and am lost in the crowd now, any crowd, the world-crowd, whose gods today are trade, patriotism and a certain limp-legged tumbler.
... Yet we are told by every authoritative voice out of the past, and we know it from the urge of our own souls, that we must love the many before we can serve them. It is fatuous to love blindly, therefore we must understand what we are about. I have touched here some small things of the crowd, which are well enough to know; otherwise we are apt to stand apart from the many crying: “How noble are the simple-minded! ”

“ From this malady of the ugliest man, from this de-genera-tion, we are by no means free. Instead of ascent to a higher genus than present man, to superman, there is descent to a lower genus. This antiquarian, hoary spirit pervades our whole social life, this re-spect for what has become old and rotten, for what can show no other merit than that it once—was! It is a sign of our own decay, this living on the dead, this ability only to resuscitate and copy past centuries—past poetry, past art, past philosophy, past morality, past religion!—this knowing in consequence no life of our very own. ”

“ But who, in his power to die, proves that he has learned to live, has overcome the ugliest thing in man, cast it out; namely, the fear of death which creates all the lies of life, and all the servility and unfreedom of men—which creates men over whom das Gewesen! the dead past, possesses power, so that they can never breathe a joyous breath, can never commit themselves to the living and the growing. But a beautiful culture will also become a good culture because one that is living is at once good and beautiful ”

“ Go with Whitman into the heart of humanity—struggle with them—not from far above them—to lift from off their backs the crushing weight of wealth and masters and idle snobs and false gods so that they may get room to spread their wings—for they have wings, and then you will know them as they are, and yourself but as one of them. ”

“ How sweet the people of the Countryside! How inevitable and unerring is the voice of the people!” As a matter of truth, unless directed by some strong man’s vision, the voice of the people has never yet given utterance to constructive truth; and the same may be said of those who cater to the public taste in politics or the so-called arts. The man who undertakes to give the people what the people want is not an artist or a true leader of any dimension. He is a tradesman and finds his place in his generation. ”

“ But I think that you will find that those who perform the wing-clipping are the other butterflies whom money or position or callousness has set above the people—not those who are really of the crowd. They of the crowd love wings, and those who truly use them. ”

“ How much love for the dead that no longer lives, how much bitter strife and war over reliques, over some sacred cloak, or sacred bone, of which history narrates, telling us that they once belonged to life. ”

“ What is the glow of the most gorgeous sunset ever splashed against the western skies beside the glow of the divine in the human which hurls itself upon you—and into you if you will let it—in a thousand beseeching, inviting, intoxicating flames from the midst of any crowd? ”

“ There is one thing in the world that will not live. There is one thing mortal more than life. It is the beauty of which poets sing. Beauty dies in every moment. It is mortal with the hours. It flashes and it dies. ”

“ The real reason for opening this subject is to express, without hatred, certain facts in the case of the Countryside which complained.
They are villagers and farm-people who live with Mother Nature without knowing her. They look into the body of Nature, but never see her face to face. The play of light and the drive of intelligence in her eyes is above the level of their gaze or too bright. Potentially they have all the living lights—the flame immortal, but it is turned low. It does not glorify them as men or parents or workmen. ”

“ If some of them still try to clip the wings of those who have struggled free from the crushing pressure, it is because of the maddening agony of their own atrophying wings. If a few seem even to be unaware of the need for wings, it is because the clamor of more insistent needs—the cries of hungry children, of bruised and broken and unsatisfied men and of suffering and degraded women—has silenced for every shame their own soul’s wing-cry. ”

“ Who is ashamed of his death and falsifies his deadness that it may look like life—who does this, bears death within himself as a power that drags him down, disfigures him in the fullness of that which he would be able to live. ”

“ The Lawson case, the case of Ford and Suhr, of Rangel and Cline, of Joe Hill, and the many other cases now pending in the courts of New York and elsewhere, all show what capital intends to do to labor.
Is labor really going to keep quiet and submit to this persecution and slavery? The unions on the Coast have determined that they will not. They are calling upon every one in sympathy with labor to join the great movement to stop the aggression of capital. They have decided on strong militant tactics to defend the workingman, his family and his union against the tyranny of the bosses. ”

“ The brave workman who dares be himself and go hungry for the honor finds sooner or later a brilliant little fact rising in his consciousness—one that comes to stay, and which future thinking must be built around: that while the people are all that is low and bad in their change and rush of personality, they are also the soil of the future, a splendid potential mass that contains every heroism and masterpiece to be; that all great things must come from the people, because great leaders of the people turn their passionate impregnation of idealism upon them ”

“ Piety,—it is this that they call admiration and veneration of every idol which for long has been played out, but still counts us of today among its devotees. Men must even deal God a mortal blow, the Living God of the living, and, with the ferocious hatred of their folly, pursue the God who sees their innermost heart as a living witness of what they would like to hide from themselves and all the world. “But he—had to die: he looked with eyes which beheld everything,—he beheld men’s depths and dregs, all his hidden ignominy and ugliness ... ”

“ All the mighty ones have been artists in life; like unto children they have walked their ways, so everlastingly sure of themselves that rarely have they been betrayed into petulance by the wobbling of their sense of superiority.
Susan Quackenbush, Portage, Wisconsin:
May one who has read your every issue with joy and enthusiasm be permitted to enter protest against that gross libel on the human race labeled The Artist in Life, in your June number? ”

“ What was this ugliest thing which Nietzsche—the great man-spy and life-appraiser—had ever discovered in a human being? Before Nietzsche wrote, thus spake Zarathustra, he expresses himself in another work as follows: “Nothing is ugly save the degenerate man.... From the physical standpoint everything ugly weakens and depresses man. It reminds of decay, danger, impotence; he literally loses strength in its presence. The effect of ugliness may be gauged by the dynamometer. ”

“ When their children revolt, they meet on every hand the hideous weight of matter, the pressure of low vibrations, and only the more splendid of them have the integrity of spirit to rise above the resistance. ”

“ They have now determined that more aggressive and militant action is necessary, if labor is not to be submerged by the oppression of capital. They are beginning to see that throughout the country the masters are picking out the most effective and intelligent fighters from the ranks of the workers and railroading them to prison, to terrorize labor and stifle the spirit of liberty and independence. ”

“ This family thinks of virtue in terms of legs. This family regards art and truth with a modulated leer. It is crudely cynical of everything outside its range. It sneers and pooh-hoos, it ostracizes and condemns. ”

“ The conventions of the world are stronger than its natural destinies. Those conventions—the conventions of the family—are not of the man’s making. Woman attends to her own subjugation. She preserves the spirit of the family, struggles and labors to keep it a unit, to keep its members alike. Moaning with the tyrannical lust for possession she enfolds her daughter in her arms. There are certain things in her daughter which must be killed. ”

“ If his son revolts the instinct of his mother is communicated to him and he fights. He borrows the mother’s weapons and he blasphemes in a half-hearted way about the duty to parents. But the beauty which the mother found easy to kill in the daughter usually discovers a hardier citadel in the son and usually he carries it safely into the world. ”