From: Tristich-AT-aol.com Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1998 01:42:35 EDT Subject: Re: At Noon In a message captioned "Zarathustra's Dream," Dan writes: > > At Noon > > [snip, snip] > > This passage is so confusing any ideas out there. > It may be helpful to put the passage into context. "At Noon" in Z follows directly upon a passage entitled "The Shadow" in which Zarathustra is annoyed by his loss of solitude as he is addressed by his shadow. Five years before he wrote Part IV of Z, Nietzsche had written another aphorism titled "At Noon," section 308 of The Wanderer and His Shadow, which is obviously recalled by the Zarathustra episode. Section 308 of WS concerns Pan's sacred hour of noon and describes the sleeping Pan: "He who has been granted an active and storm-filled morning of life is overcome at the noontide of life by a strange longing for repose that can last for months or years. It grows still around him, voices recede into the distance; the sun shines down upon him from high overhead. Upon a concealed woodland meadow he sees great Pan sleeping; all things of nature have fallen asleep with him, an expression of eternity on their face - that is how it seems to him. He wants nothing, he is troubled by nothing, his heart stands still, only his eyes are alive - it is a death with open eyes. Then the man sees many things he never saw before, and for as far as he can see everything is enmeshed in a net of light and as it were buried in it. He feels happy as he ga\zes, but it is a heavy, heavy happiness - Then at length the wind rises in the trees, noon has gone by, life again draws him to it, life with unseeing eyes, its train of followers sweeping along behind it: desire, deception, forgetfulness, destruction, transience. And thus evening rises up, more active and more storm-filled even than the morning. - To truly active men the more long enduring states of knowledge seem almost uncanny and morbid, but not unpleasant." [WS 308] > Z is sitting down at the bottom of a fruit bearing tree (he does this in the > first book). Actually, it is an old and gnarled tree that is in the grip (or embrace) of the "rich love" of the grapevine, which hides it from itself. At the end of the passage Zarathustra gets up from his resting place with "the sun still . . . straight over his head." Despite the sense of passage of "half an eternity," in fact no time has passed, and the "well of eternity" has been compressed into a single instant. Has it not been an epiphanic instant which has brought about the happy-sad moment of inspiration and transformation? Fritz --- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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