223

At any rate, the hybrid European man - a reasonably ugly plebeian, all in all - needs a costume. He needs history as a pantry for costumes. Naturally, he then notices that none of them fits his body properly - he changes and changes. Just take a look at the nineteenth century, at the rapid preferences and changes in the masquerade of style, along with the moments of despair over the fact that "nothing suits us" -. It's no use presenting oneself romantically or classically or in a Christian or Florentine or Baroque or "national" manner in moribus et artibus [in customs and the arts] - "it doesn't suit us"! But the "spirit," in particular the "historical spirit," still sees an advantage for itself even in this despair: over and over again a new piece of pre-history and a foreign country are explored, put on, set aside, packed away, and above all studied: - we are the first age with a real training in "costume": I mean in moralities, articles of faith, tastes in art, and religions, prepared as no other time ever was for a carnival in the grand style, for a spiritual revelry of laughter and high spirits, for a transcendental height of the loftiest nonsense and Aristophanic mockery of the world.3 Perhaps this is the very place where we'll still discover the realm of our own inventiveness, that realm where we too can still be original as some sort of satirists of world history and God's clowns - perhaps when nothing else today has a future, perhaps it's our laughter that still has one!

3. . . . Aristophanic : Aristophanes (456-386 BC), a major dramatist in classical Athens, the foremost writer of Old Comedy.
Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
Part VII - Aphorism # 223

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