But I asked once,
and my question almost suffocated me:
What? Is the rabble also
necessary for life?

Are poisoned fountains necessary,
and stinking fires,
and filthy dreams,
and maggots in the bread of life?

Not my hatred, — my loathing, gnawed hungrily at my life!
Ah, often my spirit was drained,
when I found even the rabble spiritual!

And holding my nose,
I went morosely through all yesterdays and todays:
truly, badly smell all yesterdays and todays
of the scribbling rabble!

Like a cripple become deaf, and blind, and dumb
— thus I have lived too long for this;
that I might not live with
the power-rabble,
the scribe-rabble,
and the pleasure-rabble.

Straining and weary I mounted stairs,
then cautiously; I felt refreshment, delight;
on the staff did life creep along
with the blind one.

What has happened to me?
How have I freed myself from loathing?
Who has rejuvenated my eye?
How have I flown to the height
where no rabble any longer sit at the wells?
Did my loathing itself create for me wings
and fountain-divining powers?
Truly, I had to fly to the loftiest height,
to find again the well of delight!

Oh, I have found it, my brothers!
Here on the loftiest height bubbles up for me the well of delight!
And there is a life at whose waters
none of the rabble drink with me!

                           ~*~
You flow almost too violently for me,
you fountain of delight!
And I often empty the goblet again, in wanting to fill it!
And yet I must learn to approach more modestly:
My heart still flows almost too violently towards you:

–My heart on which my summer burns,
my short, hot, melancholy,
over-happy summer:
how my summer heart longs for your coolness!

I have become summer entirely, and summer-noontide!
For this is our height and our home:
too high and steep we dwell here
for all unclean ones and their thirst.

…On the tree of the future we build our nest;
eagles shall bring we solitary ones
food in their beaks!

Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans by Thomas Common, The Rabble, Part 2, No. 28

The question that continues to haunt is about having to share the-fountain-of-life with communities radically at odds with one’s own. There is no divine standard for truth, or for stupidity, no universal baseline. To be alive is to partake in the mysterious wonder of life, with every other human being who lives. (For the sake of our conversation, for the moment put aside the exitence of vegetation, other mammals, etc.)

To live is to drink from the same source, a single fountain. We inhabit this planet with others, who process experience according to circumstances concealed from us.

In the look-back at my professional life, over the working years, – I interviewed and hired many. Most worked out, a good fit, to their credit, and to the credit of good luck. That’s only part of the story though. I hired several who proved to be disasters that I didn’t see coming. How can I forget spending nearly an entire day in a Cook County courtroom, to stand in front of a judge? I argued to persuade the court that my company was maliciously attacked by the individual seated on the other side of the isle. Perhaps he believed he was right. I do not know.

But yes, life is wild and woolly and reason does not begin to account for what happens! All of us share this planet. There’s no respite from stinking fires, filthy dreams and maggots… So, yes the rabble have their role to play.

I hope that you enjoyed the rest of Nietzsche/Zarathustra’s parable, the part about persevering, to push through, fatigue notwithstanding – like a marathon runner. 

Unaccountably a transition point is reached, imperfectly described as an elevation. Did the aesthetic repulsion that one feels for abject stupidity transform, a rotation of axis, shift of focus, the feeling of malaise lifting, of again drinking higher, nearer to the source, where the water is refreshing and pure, uncontaminated by the braying rabble…

How does it feel to become summer, even to become a summer’s day at high noon?

*Full disclosure I took a writers liberty to do a few minor edits of the translation, a substitution of contemporary terms for archaic, in order to promote readability.