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which is intended to mislead, cool, scientific, even ironic, intentionally foreground, intentionally keeping in suspense. Gradually an increasing disquiet; isolated flashes of lightning; very unpleasant truths becoming audible as a dull rumbling in the distance – until at last a tempo feroce is attained in which everything surges forward with tremendous tension. At the conclusion each time amid perfectly awful detonations a new truth visible between thick clouds. Part 2 (“This coin . . .”) appears to repudiate “fame”, actually repudiates the purchase of fame by the substitution of virtue for truth – the trimming of truth to the world’s moral demands. The third and fourth poems transport us to the end of Part Three of Zarathustra, the ecstatic conclusion of Zarathustra’s spiritual odyssey and his attainment of full enlightenment. The euphoric imagery is here so closely compacted as sometimes to constitute almost a series of catchwords and -phrases whose meaning, though well and unequivocally established in Nietzsche’s earlier writings and familiar to readers of them, is by no means conveyed by the text of the poem itself. I think I shall have done my duty by the reader if I offer, not a full “explication” of this text – which would in any case probably exhaust his/her patience – but the following key which may by itself prove adequate to unlocking it. The passage again comes from Ecce Homo: My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity. Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity, still less to dissemble it – all idealism is untruthfulness in the face of necessity – but to love it. . . . 94
page 97
Of the Poverty of the Richest Man (page 75) The last of the Dithyrambs of Dionysus relaxes tempo and tension. It is the happiest poem in the collection. The opening line answers the question asked by the opening lines of “Fame and Eternity ” and in doing so recalls the opening of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains. Here he had the enjoyment of his spirit and his solitude and he did not weary of it for ten years. But at last his heart turned – and one morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and spoke to it thus . . . In the light of these correspondences, it is probably not farfetched to conclude that the “Zarathustras” of the Dithyrambs of Dionysus are not so much repetitions of the grand central figure of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as alternatives to him. 95

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which is intended to mislead, cool, scientific, even ironic, intentionally foreground, intentionally keeping in suspense. Gradually an increasing disquiet; isolated flashes of lightning; very unpleasant truths becoming audible as a dull rumbling in the distance – until at last a tempo feroce is attained in which everything surges forward with tremendous tension. At the conclusion each time amid perfectly awful detonations a new truth visible between thick clouds. Part 2 (“This coin . . .”) appears to repudiate “fame”, actually repudiates the purchase of fame by the substitution of virtue for truth – the trimming of truth to the world’s moral demands. The third and fourth poems transport us to the end of Part Three of Zarathustra, the ecstatic conclusion of Zarathustra’s spiritual odyssey and his attainment of full enlightenment. The euphoric imagery is here so closely compacted as sometimes to constitute almost a series of catchwords and -phrases whose meaning, though well and unequivocally established in Nietzsche’s earlier writings and familiar to readers of them, is by no means conveyed by the text of the poem itself. I think I shall have done my duty by the reader if I offer, not a full “explication” of this text – which would in any case probably exhaust his/her patience – but the following key which may by itself prove adequate to unlocking it. The passage again comes from Ecce Homo:

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity. Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity, still less to dissemble it – all idealism is untruthfulness in the face of necessity – but to love it. . . .

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