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The more a psychologist - a born and inevitable psychologist and analyst of the soul - turns himself towards exceptional examples and human beings, the greater the danger to him of suffocation from pity. He has to be hard and cheerful, more so than another man. For the corruption and destruction of loftier men, of the stranger type of soul, is the rule: it is terrible to have such a rule always before one's eyes. The multifaceted torture of the psychologist who has uncovered this destructiveness, who once discovers and then almost always rediscovers throughout all history this entire inner "hopelessness" of the loftier people, this eternal "too late!" in every sense, can perhaps one day come to the point where he turns with bitterness against his own lot and attempts self-destruction - where he "corrupts" himself. With almost every psychologist we will see a revealing inclination for and delight in associating with ordinary and well-adjusted people: that indicates that he always needs healing, that he requires some sort of refuge and forgetting, far from what his insights and incisions, his "trade," has laid on his conscience. Fear of his memory is characteristic of him. He is easily reduced to silence before the judgments of others; he listens with an unmoving face as people revere, admire, love, and transfigure where he has seen, or he even hides his silence, while he expressly agrees with some foreground point of view or other. Perhaps the paradox of his situation gets so terrible that the crowd, the educated, and the enthusiasts learn great admiration precisely where he has learned great pity as well as great contempt - the admiration for "great men" and miraculous animals for whose sake people bless and honour the fatherland, the earth, the value of humanity, and themselves, those to whom they draw the attention of the young and whom they use as role models in their education . . . And who knows whether in all great examples up to this point the very same thing has not happened: the crowd worshipped a god - and the "god" was only a poor sacrificial animal! Success has always been the greatest liar, and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised in his creation to the point where he is unrecognizable; the "work" of the artist and the philosopher first invents the man who has created it or is supposed to have created it; the "great men," as they are honoured, are small inferior works of fiction in the background; in the world of historical values counterfeit is king. These great poets, for example, this Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol (I don't dare mention greater names, but I have them in mind) - perhaps have to be the way they are now: men of the moment, enthusiastic, sensuous, childish, careless and sudden with trust and mistrust; with souls in which some fracture or other normally has to be concealed; often taking revenge in their works for an inner slur, often seeking with their flights upward to forget some all-too-true memory, often lost in the mud and almost infatuated, until they become like will o' the wisps around a swamp and pretend that they are stars - then the populace may well call them idealists - often struggling against a long disgust, with a recurring ghost of unbelief which makes them cold and forces them to yearn for gloria [glory] and to gobble up "belief in themselves" from the hands of intoxicated flatterers - what torture are these great artists and the loftier human beings in general for the man who has once guessed who they are! It is so understandable that these artists should so readily experience from woman - who is clairvoyant in the world of suffering and who unfortunately also seeks to help and to save far beyond her powers - those eruptions of unlimited and most devoted pity which the crowd, above all the worshipping masses, does not understand and which it showers with curious and complacent interpretations. This pity regularly deceives itself about its power; woman may believe that love can do everything - that's a belief essential to her. Alas, anyone who knows about the heart can guess how poor, stupid, helpless, presumptuous, mistaken, more easily destroyed than saved even the best and most profound love is! It is possible that beneath the sacred story and disguise of the life of Jesus there lies hidden one of the most painful examples of the martyrdom of knowledge about love: the martyrdom of the most innocent and most desiring heart, which was never satisfied with any human love, which demanded love, to be loved and nothing else, with hardness, with madness, with fearful outbreaks against those who denied him love; the history of a poor man unsatisfied and insatiable with love, who had to invent hell in order to send there those who did not wish to love him - and who finally, having grown to understand human love, had to invent a God who is entirely love, who is capable of total love - who takes pity on human love because it is so pathetic, so unknowing! Anyone who feels this way, who knows about love in this way - seeks death. - But why dwell on such painful things? Assuming we don't have to.-