562

The settled and the free.  It is only in the underworld that we are shown something of the gloomy background to all those adventurer's joys which shine around Odysseus and his kind like an eternal shimmering of the sea  and once we are shown that background we never again forget it: the mother of Odysseus¹⁵⁴ died of grief and of longing for her child! One person moves restlessly from place to place, and the heart of another who is settled and tender breaks as a consequence: so it has always been! Sorrow breaks the heart of those to whom it happens that he whom they love best deserts their faith  this is part of the tragedy which free spirits produce and of which they are sometimes aware! Then they too have at some time or other to go down to the dead, like Odysseus, to assuage their grief and soothe their tenderness.

563

The delusion of a moral world-order.  There is absolutely no eternal necessity which decrees that every guilt will be atoned and paid for  that such a thing exists has been a dreadful and to only a minuscule extent useful delusion  : just as it is a delusion that everything is guilt which is felt as such. I t is not things, but opinions about things that have absolutely no existence, which have so deranged mankind!

564

Just beyond experience!  Even great spirits have only their five-fingers' breadth of experience  just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.

565

Dignity and ignorance in union.  When we understand we become polite, happy, inventive, and when we have only learned enough and have created eyes and ears for ourselves our souls exhibit more charm and pliability. But we understand very little, and are poorly instructed, and so it rarely happens that we embrace a thing and thus make ourselves lovable too: what we are much more likely to do is move stiffly and insensitively through city, nature, history, and we are somewhat proud of this deportment and coldness, as though it were the effect of superiority. Indeed, our ignorance and our lack of desire for knowledge are very adept at stalking about as dignity, as character.

566

Living cheaply.  The cheapest and most inoffensive way of living is that of the thinker: for, to get at once to the main point, the things he needs most are precisely those which others despise and throw away . Then: he is easily pleased and has no expensive pleasures; his work is not hard but as it were southerly; his days and nights are not spoiled by pangs of conscience; he moves about, eats, drinks and sleeps in proportion as his mind grows ever calmer, stronger and brighter; he rejoices in his body and has no reason to be afraid of it; he has no need of company, except now and then so as afterwards to embrace his solitude the more tenderly; as a substitute for the living he has the dead, and even for friends he has a substitute: namely the best who have ever lived.  Consider whether it is not the opposite desires and habits that make the life of men expensive and consequently arduous and often insupportable.  In another sense, to be sure, the life of the thinker is the most expensive  nothing is too good for him; and to be deprived of the best would here be an unendurable deprivation.