Seeing that I must shortly approach mankind with the heaviest demand that has ever been made on it, it seems to me indispensable to say who I am. This ought really to be known already: for I have not neglected to “bear witness” about myself. But the disparity between the greatness of my task and the smallness of my contemporaries has found expression in the fact that I have been neither heard nor even so much as seen. I live on my own credit, it is perhaps merely a prejudice that I am alive at all? … I need only to talk with any of the “cultured people” who come to the Ober-Engadin in the summer to convince myself that I am not alive … Under these circumstances there exists a duty against which my habit, even more the pride of my instincts revolts, namely to say: Listen to me! for I am thus and thus. Do not, above all, confound me with what I am not!
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, from Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, translated by R J Hollingdale
*
“I live on my own credit” This line inspired me today. It calls me to responsibility to make, what I make of my life. Whether alive or not, real or not, important or not, I create it.
It’s a fabulous line, isn’t it?
I like the fact that he realizes that no one is listening. Does anybody “get” him? does anybody really “get” us? Do WE know who we are? He is really saying: what you see may not be what you get.
Very astute comment, Kayti.
To further confound this whole thing, what I am or what I am not changes from day to day, even moment to moment. At least it does for me. I am not the same person I was a year ago, so who am I really?
Who you are really is a space in the non-history of the world like me ;)
And space can neither be contained or studied. I like that.
I love it! But I must confess I like the first sentence the best.
Ha! It’s my fave too. And the second and the third and …
Pure Nietzsche enacting humanity.
— Listen to me! for I am thus and thus. Do not, above all, confound me with what I am not!–
brilliant. Xx
Can you hear the two-year-old in there too? … “Listen to me!”