Like everyone who has never lived among his equals and who finds the concept of “retaliation” as inaccessible as, say, the concept of “equal rights,” I forbid myself all countermeasures, all protective measures, and, as is only fair, also any defense, any “justification,” in any cases when some small or very great folly is perpetrated against me.
Against all this the sick person has only one great remedy: I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism without revolt which is exemplified by a Russian soldier who, finding a campaign too strenuous, finally lies down in the snow. No longer to accept anything at all, no longer to take anything, no longer to absorb anything—to cease reacting altogether.
This fatalism is not always merely the courage to die; it can also preserve life under the most perilous conditions by reducing the metabolism, slowing it down, as a kind of will to hibernate. Carrying this logic a few steps further, we arrive at the fakir who sleeps for weeks in a grave.
Sit as little as possible; give no credence to any thought that was not born outdoors while one moved about freely—in which the muscles are not celebrating a feast, too. All prejudices come from the intestines.
The sedentary life—as I have said once before—is the real sin against the holy spirit.
The choice of nutrition; the choice of climate and place: the third point at which one must not commit a blunder at any price is the choice of one's own kind of recreation. Here, too, depending on the degree to which a spirit is sui generis, the limits of what is permitted to him—that is, profitable for him—are narrow, quite narrow. In my case, every kind of reading belongs among my recreations—hence among the things that liberate me from myself, that allow me to walk about in strange sciences and souls—that I no longer take seriously. Reading is precisely my recreation from my own seriousness. During periods when I am hard at work you will not find me surrounded by books: I'd beware of letting anyone near me talk, much less think. And that is what reading would mean.
Another counsel of prudence and self-defense is to react as rarely as possible, and to avoid situations and relationships that would condemn one to suspend, as it were, one's "freedom" and initiative and to become a mere reagent. As a parable I choose association with books. Scholars who at bottom do little nowadays but thumb books—philologists, at a moderate estimate, about a day—ultimately lose entirely their capacity to think for themselves. When they don't thumb, they don't think. They respond to a stimulus (a thought they have read) whenever they think—in the end, they do nothing but react. Scholars spend all of their energies on saying Yes and No, on criticism of what others have thought—they themselves no longer think.
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!
Whoever does not merely comprehend the word "Dionysian" but comprehends himself in the word "Dionysian" needs no refutation of Plato or Christianity or Schopenhauer—he smells the decay.
The danger of those who always give is that they lose their sense of shame; and the heart and hand of those who always mete out become callous from always meting out.