Remain true to the earth, my brothers,
with the power of your virtue!

Let your bestowing love and your knowledge
be devoted to be the meaning of the earth!
Thus do I pray and appeal to you.

Let it not fly away from the earthly
and beat against eternal walls
with its wings!

Ah, there has always been
so much flown-away virtue!
Lead, like me, the flown-away virtue
back to the earth
– yes, back to body and life:
that it may give to the earth its meaning, a human meaning!

A hundred times thus far
has spirit as well as virtue
flown away and blundered.
Alas, in our body dwells still
all this delusion and blundering:
body and will has it there become.

A hundred times thus far
has spirit as well as virtue
attempted and erred.

Yes, an attempt has man been.
Alas, much ignorance and error
has become embodied in us!

Not only the rationality of millennia
— also their madness, breaks out in us.
Dangerous is it to be an heir.

Still we fight step by step
with the giant Chance,
and over all mankind
has thus far ruled nonsense,
the lack-of-sense.

Let your spirit and your virtue
be devoted to the sense of the earth,
my brothers:
let the value of everything be determined anew by you!

Therefore you shall be fighters! Therefore you shall be creators!

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Thomas Common, The Bestowing Virtue No. 22

Recent events in the West, indeed involving every nation and community on the globe remind us that the evolutionary assumption of humankind has been premature. Eliot says it better in his poem, The Dry Salvages:

The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror…

Humanity, writ large clearly, is not slowly moving forward, upward and onward, never mind the seduction of new technologies, Teslas, iphones, Youtubes of dancing cats, etc., etc.. A tariff trade war has been initiated between the United States and every nation. China claims hegemony over the South China Sea, China asserts ownership of Taiwan, Palestinians under siege die daily, peace between Ukraine and Russia seems dependent upon the promises of a notorious liar.

How much madness is that? Would you care to quantify the insanity of this present moment? Zarathustra/Nietzsche offers this metaphor: a Millennia’s Worth!

Blessed or cursed with an intellectual bent, perhaps you find yourself, more often than you’d care to confess, fixated upon the paradox of humankind. Given all that we’ve survived, all that we’ve accomplished, – at present conditions and prospects seem dark, and darker.

Time enough for a song! This one by Leonard Cohen fits: Hallelujah.

You and I are heirs to the heights of reason and the maelstrom of madness.

Thus the meaning becomes transparent: the words of Zarathustra take the form of a prayer, an invocation, a sacred appeal. You and I, the reader are addressed, an appeal to attend to ourselves and our relationship with the earth, to own responsibility for crafting fresh values, new forms of social living, etc..

The antidote for a heritage of madness is to be a fighter, to be a creator.