The instinct of self-defense has become worn-out in them; otherwise they would resist books. The scholar - a decadent.I have seen this with my own eyes: gifted natures with a generous and free disposition, "read to ruin" in their thirties - merely matches that one has to strike to make them emit sparks - "thoughts."Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one's strength - to read a book at such a time is simply depraved!
Faced with a scholarly book. - We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors - walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful. Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?
We read rarely, but not worse on that account. How quickly we guess how someone has come by his ideas; whether it was while sitting in front of his inkwell, with a pinched belly, his head bowed low over the paper - in which case we are quickly finished with his book, too! Cramped intestines betray themselves - you can bet on that - no less than closet air, closet ceilings, closet narrowness. - This was what I felt just now as I closed a very decent scholarly book - gratefully, very gratefully, but also with a sense of relief.
Almost always the books of scholars are somehow oppressive, oppressed; the "specialist" emerges somewhere - his zeal, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunched back; every specialist has his hunched back. Every scholarly book also mirrors a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked.You see the friends of your youth again after they have taken possession of their specialty - and always the opposite has happened, too! Always they themselves are now possessed by it and obsessed with it. Grown into their nook, crumpled beyond recognition, unfree, deprived of their balance, emaciated and angular all over except for one place where they are downright rotund - one feels moved and falls silent when one sees them again this way. Every craft, even if it should have a golden floor, has a leaden ceiling over it that presses and presses down upon the soul until that becomes queer and crooked. Nothing can be done about that. Let nobody suppose that one could possibly avoid such crippling by some artifice of education. On this earth one pays dearly for every kind of mastery, and perhaps one pays too dearly for everything. For having a specialty one pays by also being the victim of this specialty. But you would have it otherwise - cheaper and fairer and above all more comfortable - isn't that right, my dear contemporaries? Well then, but in that case you also immediately get something else: instead of the craftsman and master, the "man of letters," the dexterous, "polydexterous" man of letters who, to be sure, lacks the hunched back - not counting the posture he assumes before you, being the salesman of the spirit and the "carrier" of culture - the man of letters who really is nothing but "represents" almost everything, playing and "substituting" for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated in place of the expert.
No, my scholarly friends, I bless you even for your hunched backs. And for despising, as I do, the "men of letters" and culture parasites. And for not knowing how to make a business of the spirit. And for having opinions that cannot be translated into financial values. And for not representing anything that you are not. And because your sole aim is to become masters of your craft, with reverence for every kind of mastery and competence, and with uncompromising opposition to everything that is semblance, half-genuine, dressed up, virtuosolike, demagogical, or histrionic in litteris et artibus - to everything that cannot prove to you its unconditional probity in discipline and prior training.à
(Even genius does not compensate for such a deficiency, however much it may deceive people about it. This becomes clear to anyone who has ever watched our most gifted painters and musicians from nearby. All of them, with scarcely any exception, know how to use cunning inventions of manners, of makeshift devices, and even of principles to give themselves after the event an artificial semblance of such probity, of such solidity of training and culture - without, of course, managing to deceive themselves, without silencing for good their own bad con- [ science. For you surely know that all great modern artists suffer j from a guilty conscience.)
I like to lie here where the children play, beside the broken wall, among thistles and red poppies. I am still a scholar to the children, and also to the thistles and red poppies. They are innocent even in their malice. But to the sheep I am no longer a scholar; thus my lot decrees it - bless it!
For this is the truth: I have moved from the house of the scholars and I even banged the door behind me. My soul sat hungry at their table too long; I am not, like them, trained to pursue knowledge as if it were nut-cracking. I love freedom and the air over the fresh earth; rather would I sleep on ox hides than on their decorums and respectabilities.
I am too hot and burned by my own thoughts; often it nearly takes my breath away. Then I must go out into the open and away from all dusty rooms. But they sit cool in the cool shade: in everything they want to be mere spectators, and they beware of sitting where the sun burns on the steps. Like those who stand in the street and gape at the people who pass by, they too wait and gape at thoughts that others have thought.
If you seize them with your hands they raise a cloud of dust like flour bags, involuntarily; but who could guess that their dust comes from grain and from the yellow delight of summer fields? When they pose as wise, their little epigrams and truths chill me: their wisdom often has an odor as if it came from the swamps; and verily, I have also heard frogs croak out of it. They are skillful and have clever fingers: why would my simplicity want to be near their multiplicity? All threading and knotting and weaving their fingers understand: thus they knit the socks of the spirit.
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