Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2000 22:07:05 +0200
Subject: Re: Jeremiah Luna quote


Jeremiah Luna wrote:
> >We are as nietzsche says in one of his essays "on the back of [a] great
> > tiger being pulled through a forest of dreams." or something like that

Kenneth Johnson wrote: 
> Hey Jeremiah, if you ever recall the 'place' in N where the actual line
> above resides, I'd kind of like to know where. I say 'kind of' because its
> phrasing as you write it rings so beautifully poetic in my ear I might be
> disappointed if the actual were too much at variant, but still - -



The quote can be found toward the end of the third paragraph of section
1 in Nietzsche's 1873 essay "Ueber Wahrheit und Luege im
aussermoralischen Sinne" ("On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"). It
might indeed be just a little bit disappointing, compared to what
Jeremiah wrote, but on the other hand it belongs to a sentence which is
all the more impressive. Here it is, first in the original:

"und wehe der verhaengnisvollen Neubegier, die durch eine Spalte einmal
aus dem Bewusstseinszimmer heraus und hinab zu sehen vermoechte und die
jetzt ahnte, dass auf dem Erbarmungslosen, dem Gierigen, dem
Unersaettlichen, dem Moerderischen der Mensch ruht, in der
Gleichgueltigkeit seines Nichtwissens, und gleichsam auf dem Ruecken
eines Tigers in Traeumen haengend."

In English translation:

"And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power to
peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and
then suspect that man is sustained in the indifference of his ignorance
by that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous - as if
hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger."


T.F. Wagner
Munich, Germany