271

What most profoundly divides two men is a different sense and degree of cleanliness. What help is all honesty and mutual utility, what help is all the good will for each other: in the end the fact remains - they "can't stand each other's smell!" The highest instinct for cleanliness puts the person marked by it in the strangest and most dangerous isolation, as a saint: for that's simply what saintliness is - the highest spiritualization of the instinct in question. Any awareness of an indescribable abundance of pleasure in the bath, any lust and thirst which constantly drives the soul out of the night into the morning and out of cloudiness, the "affliction," into what is bright, gleaming, profound, fine; just as such a tendencysingles out - it is a noble tendency - so it also separates . The pity of the saint is pity for the dirt of those who are human, all-too-human. And there are degrees and heights where the saint feels pity itself as contamination, as dirt . . .

272

Signs of nobility: never thinking of reducing our duties to duties for everyone; not wanting to give up one's own responsibility, not wanting to share it; to include one's privileges and acting on them among one's duties.

273

A human being who strives for something great looks at everyone he meets along his way either as a means or as a delay and an obstacle - or as a temporary place to rest. His characteristic high-quality goodness towards his fellow men is first possible when he has reached his height and governs. His impatience and his awareness that until that point he is always sentenced to comedy - for even war is a comedy and conceals, just as every means hides the end - corrupt all contacts for him: this kind of man knows loneliness and what is most poisonous in it.

274

The problem for those who wait .- For a higher man in whom the solution to a problem lies asleep, strokes of luck and all sorts of unpredictable things are necessary for him to swing into action at just the right time -"for an eruption," as we could say. Ordinarily it does not happen, and in all the corners of the earth sit people waiting, who hardly know to what extent they are waiting, but even less that they are waiting in vain. From time to time the call to wake up, that chance which provides the "permission" for action comes too late - at a time when the best youth and power for action have already been used up in sitting still. And many a man, in the very moment he "sprang up," has found to his horror that his limbs have gone to sleep and his spirit is already too heavy! "It is too late," he says to himself, having lost faith in himself, and is now forever useless. - In the realm of the genius, could "Raphael without hands," taking that phrase in the widest sense, perhaps not be the exception but the rule?² - Genius is perhaps not really so rare, but the five hundred hands needed to tyrannize the kairos, "the right time," to seize chance by the forelock!

275

Anyone who does not want to see the height of a man looks all the more keenly at what is low and in his foreground - and in the process gives himself away.