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284. To live in a vast and proud tranquility; always beyond... To have,
or not to have, one's emotions, one's For and Against, according to
choice; to lower oneself to them for hours; to SEAT oneself on them as
upon horses, and often as upon asses:--for one must know how to make
use of their stupidity as well as of their fire. To conserve one's
three hundred foregrounds; also one's black spectacles: for there are
circumstances when nobody must look into our eyes, still less into our
"motives." And to choose for company that roguish and cheerful vice,
politeness. And to remain master of one's four virtues, courage,
insight, sympathy, and solitude. For solitude is a virtue with us, as
a sublime bent and bias to purity, which divines that in the contact of
man and man--"in society"--it must be unavoidably impure. All society
makes one somehow, somewhere, or sometime--"commonplace."

285. The greatest events and thoughts--the greatest thoughts, however,
are the greatest events--are longest in being comprehended: the
generations which are contemporary with them do not EXPERIENCE such
events--they live past them. Something happens there as in the realm of
stars. The light of the furthest stars is longest in reaching man; and
before it has arrived man DENIES--that there are stars there. "How
many centuries does a mind require to be understood?"--that is also a
standard, one also makes a gradation of rank and an etiquette therewith,
such as is necessary for mind and for star.

286. "Here is the prospect free, the mind exalted." [FOOTNOTE: Goethe's
"Faust," Part II, Act V. The words of Dr. Marianus.]--But there is a
reverse kind of man, who is also upon a height, and has also a free
prospect--but looks DOWNWARDS.

287. What is noble? What does the word "noble" still mean for us
nowadays? How does the noble man betray himself, how is he recognized
under this heavy overcast sky of the commencing plebeianism, by which
everything is rendered opaque and leaden?--It is not his actions which
establish his claim--actions are always ambiguous, always inscrutable;
neither is it his "works." One finds nowadays among artists and scholars
plenty of those who betray by their works that a profound longing for
nobleness impels them; but this very NEED of nobleness is radically
different from the needs of the noble soul itself, and is in fact the
eloquent and dangerous sign of the lack thereof. It is not the works,
but the BELIEF which is here decisive and determines the order of
rank--to employ once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper
meaning--it is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about
itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and
perhaps, also, is not to be lost.--THE NOBLE SOUL HAS REVERENCE FOR
ITSELF.--

288. There are men who are unavoidably intellectual, let them turn
and twist themselves as they will, and hold their hands before their
treacherous eyes--as though the hand were not a betrayer; it always
comes out at last that they have something which they hide--namely,
intellect. One of the subtlest means of deceiving, at least as long as
possible, and of successfully representing oneself to be stupider
than one really is--which in everyday life is often as desirable as
an umbrella,--is called ENTHUSIASM, including what belongs to it, for
instance, virtue. For as Galiani said, who was obliged to know it: VERTU
EST ENTHOUSIASME.

289. In the writings of a recluse one always hears something of the echo
of the wilderness, something of the murmuring tones and timid vigilance
of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry itself, there
sounds a new and more dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. He who
has sat day and night, from year's end to year's end, alone with his
soul in familiar discord and discourse, he who has become a cave-bear,
or a treasure-seeker, or a treasure-guardian and dragon in his cave--it
may be a labyrinth, but can also be a gold-mine--his ideas themselves
eventually acquire a twilight-colour of their own, and an odour, as much
of the depth as of the mould, something uncommunicative and repulsive,
which blows chilly upon every passer-by. The recluse does not believe
that a philosopher--supposing that a philosopher has always in the first
place been a recluse--ever expressed his actual and ultimate opinions in
books: are not books written precisely to hide what is in us?--indeed,
he will doubt whether a philosopher CAN have "ultimate and actual"
opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him there is not, and must
necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer
world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every bottom, beneath every
"foundation." Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy--this is a
recluse's verdict: "There is something arbitrary in the fact that the
PHILOSOPHER came to a stand here, took a retrospect, and looked around;
that he HERE laid his spade aside and did not dig any deeper--there
is also something suspicious in it." Every philosophy also CONCEALS a
philosophy; every opinion is also a LURKING-PLACE, every word is also a
MASK.