Night. In darkness things gain definition, a better focus.

I dreamed in the early morning hours. The detail has already escaped my recall. The gist, the weight of the presences, a female voice spoke to me saying that I must attend to female perspectives in my life. Why that point? I am a guy, knowing nothing except my solitary guy-viewpoint of life. Females, especially those related by marriage and by blood have a distinctly female, non-male POV of life, and therein lie lessons, lessons found there, and nowhere else.

Who doesn’t crave love? Everyone does, even if many are unaware… The lonesomeness that I feel, my cage is relieved, opened by difference, by a distinct, even the disturbing “other” story.

What I need — light and dark dancing in concert, in symmetry, a composition, melody and harmony…

TIS night:
now a gushing fountain speaks louder.
And my soul also
is a gushing fountain.

‘Tis night:
only now all songs
of the loving ones awake.
And my soul also is the song
of a loving one.

Something unappeased, unappeasable,
is within me;
it longs to find expression.

A craving for love is within me,
which speaks itself
the language of love.

        ~*~
Light am I:
ah, that I were night!
But it is my lonesomeness
to be clothed with light!

Ah, if I were dark and nightly!
How would I suck at the breasts of light!

And you yourselves would I bless,
you twinkling starlets like glowworms aloft!
— and would rejoice in the gifts of your light.

But I live in my own light,
I drink again (only) myself, the flames that
break forth from me.

I know not the happiness of the receiver;
and often I have imagined that
stealing must be more blessed than receiving.

It is my underdevelopment
that my hand never ceases to help, desiring to help;
it is my feeling of envy when I see waiting eyes
and the brightened nights of longing.

                            ~*~

Oh, the misery of all givers, the fixer-uppers!
Oh, the darkening of my sun!
Oh, the craving to crave!
Oh, the violent hunger in satiety!

They take from me:
but do I truly touch their soul?
There is a gap between giving and receiving;
and the smallest gap has finally to be
bridged over.

A hunger arises out of my beauty:
I should like to injure those I illumine;
I should like to rob those I have gifted:
— thus do I hunger for wickedness.

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Thomas Common, Part II, The Night-Song No. 31

I have exercised the writers discretion to substitute currently used terms for some of the anachronisms of the translation.