Butterflies as big as children

October of Zarathustra

Getting lost in your work is the best.

It hardly ever happens to me any longer. Time seldom slips away any more. I miss that feeling of being out of time — in a lingering present. I think I did it more often when I was young.

I can't lock in as well as some people can, to the exclusion of everything else around me. I have known people who have that power, who don't even hear people talking to them when they really get going. If anyone knows a way to cultivate that, let me know. 

In the chapters of Thus Spoke Zarathustra that I read this morning, I suspect something like that feeling of flow, that getting lost in creation, is the metaphor behind talk of the sea. I could be wrong, but that's my bet. 

I don't think anyone actually wants to drown, that's what I'm saying.

Zarathustra meets a soothsayer who tells him that there is nothing new under the sun. Everything repeats itself, over and over again endlessly. And the soothsayer asks this odd question: "Where is there a sea in which one could still drown?"

Note to readers: This chapter is written confusingly. Usually most of the dialogue in these chapters is Zarathustra making a speech, but 2.19 opens with the soothsayer speaking. I missed that. I read it as Zarathustra at first. I only figured out it was not him later. This makes the rest of it make a little more sense once you see that. It's easy to miss the way it's structured. 

Then in 2.20 Zarathustra goes off on how the Will to Power can be an act of creation. The will is a creator. It can be a lame creator or a bad creator, but it's still a creator. 

This seems like a callback to the prior chapter in which the soothsayer says there's never anything new. There can be something new, if there's a will. Perhaps this is what Zarathustra means by saying he will show the soothsayer a sea he can drown in.

The soothsayer

Zarathustra gets really depressed by the sayings of a prophet and he passes out for a long time and has a crazy dream. In the dream, he has started to serve death, but the world around him begins rebelling and terrifying him. And then he wakes up. His disciples argue that Zarathustra was actually the world, pushing his dream self back to life, but Zarathustra seems skeptical of this reading at the end.

• Like I said, I have read this book before, but if you had asked me whether Zarathustra ever found any disciples, I would have told you he didn't. It's just him wandering around giving speeches to strangers. Totally wrong. This book for sure did not sink in the first time I went through it.

On redemption

Zarathustra meets some cripples who ask him to prove his wisdom by healing them. But he refuses. This seems to be a comment on Jesus healing the sick in the Bible. Zarathustra suspects that healing them would just get them into more trouble. Then he starts going off on the will and all it can do, but also what it can't do. It can't turn back time.

One line

“It is difficult to live among men because keeping silent is so difficult. Especially for a babbler.” —Zarathustra.

• He gets me.

—Brady Dale
October 13, 2026

Next Zarathustra: The good hunter shall have a good hunt