Oh, you nostalgic liars,
you avaricious ones!

You, without innocence in your desire:
and how you discredit desiring on that account!

Truly, not as creators, as birth-parents,
or as revelers do you love the earth!

WHERE IS INNOCENCE?
Where there is will to childbearing. And he who
seeks to create beyond himself, has for me the purest will.

WHERE IS BEAUTY?
Where I must will with my whole Will;
where I will love and perish,
that an image may not remain merely an abstraction.

Loving and perishing: these have rhymed from eternity.
Will to love: that is to be ready also for death.

Thus do I speak to you cowards!*

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Thomas Common, Part II Immaculate Perception

Wednesday morning is grey, a blustering wind moves the trees and a gentle rain falls. Rain is sorely needed. I heard a meteorologist report that we are 5 inches short of the usual rainfall for June. Water is life. Who would not rejoice to see, to feel a gentle rain?

Unaccountably a magical playlist of tunes is featured this morning at Starbucks. Take A Chance On Me by Abba is now playing. Before that I Feel Love by Donna Summer was broadcast.

The rain, the tunes, and the hot, astringent flavor of coffee coincide, adding heft to the 1885 quotation from Nietzsche-Zarathustra.

Zarathustra aims his disdainful comments at his European contemporaries. That is to say the stick-up-the-ass, Victorian, moralizing, church-going, cultured defenders of the status quo. Now we who oppose the ascendant, take-no-prisoners, feckless, soulless, dissimulating Trump party –share the same spirit with Zarathustra.

We are bound to keep asking, over and over…

Where?

Where?

What have you done with innocence and beauty?

Of course the featured tune is from Donna Summer!

*I have exercised a writer’s prerogative to substitute contemporary terms for some of the obsolete language in the translation.