Der Welt

Do you know what ‘the world’ is to me? Shall I show you it in my mirror? This world: a monster of force, without beginning, without end, a fixed, iron quantity of force which grows neither larger nor smaller, which doesn’t exhaust but only transforms itself, as a whole unchanging in size, an economy without expenditure or losses, but equally without increase, without income, enclosed by ‘nothingness’ as by a boundary, not something blurred, squandered, not something infinitely extended; instead, as a determinate force set into a determinate space, and not into a space that is ‘empty’ but as force everywhere, as a play of forces and forces – waves simultaneously one and ‘many’, accumulating here while diminishing there, an ocean of forces storming and flooding within themselves, eternally changing, eternally rushing back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and flood of its forms, shooting out from the simplest into the most multifarious, from the stillest, coldest, most rigid into the most fiery, wild, self-contradictory, and then coming home from abundance to simplicity, from the play of contradiction back to the pleasure of harmony, affirming itself even in this sameness of it’s courses and years, blessing itself as what must eternally return, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no surfeit, no fatigue – this, my Dionysian world of eternal self-creating, of eternal self-destroying, this mystery of dual delights, this my beyond good and evil, without goal, unless there is a goal in the happiness of a circle, without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself – and do you want a name for this world? A solution to all its riddles? A light for you too, for you, the most secret, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly? – This world is the will to power – and nothing besides!And you yourselves too are also this will to power – and nothing besides!-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche July 1885


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