Everything straight lies

October of Zarathustra

Zarathustra is really a blowhard, but you can get away with it when you're famous.

Part three of Thus Spoke Zarathustra opens with him wandering over hills and looking out at the sea. Then he decides to go to sea, because he loves people who adventure.

He's melancholy, though, because he feels he has betrayed his friends back on the Happy Isles. So when he gets on board the ship he's silent for two days, even though everyone is curious about him.

Zarathustra is famous now.

So then when he finally starts talking he just blathers on for a long time with this insane story about a dwarf sitting on his chest. 

You know that guy

In my early 20s I was living in Madison, Wisconsin. I had some colleagues at a related organization I traveled with sometimes. There was this one guy from Alaska who everyone thought was the funniest guy around. He just made jokes constantly. 

But here's the thing: You could never have any kind of real conversation around him. No one could finish a thought before he jumped in with a joke that everyone thought was so funny. 

No one else seemed to notice or care. They just loved him. He had everyone in his spell. 

And maybe I'm the one who was wrong? The best conversation is play of course. Maybe it's wrong to worry about making points, finishing thoughts? The point of conversation is just to have fun with it. 

Maybe I'm doing it wrong. On the other hand, if conversation is a game, that guy was a ball hog — even if he was a great shot! 

Zarathustra reminds me of that guy.

It would all sound terrible, but at least he starts off by complimenting the ship's crew, telling them he loves people who adventure. So that's nice. Once again, though, he doesn't show much interest in his audience. It's all always about Zarathustra. 

But what do you expect from the guy who said, "In the end, one only experiences oneself." 

Not true, Zarathustra! When you're around, no one experiences anything but you.

Eternal recurrence 

It seems like part three is going to venture into his idea of eternal recurrence. It's been a while since I've waded into that, but it's the part of Nietzsche's thinking I've always had the hardest time with.

For what it's worth, he introduces it vividly: with a snake stuck in a shepherd's mouth. Say what you will about Nietzsche, but he's cinematic.

The Wanderer

Zarathustra climbs mountains and decides he has always preferred mountains to plains. He reaches his highest mountain alone and realizes that the greatness he needs to top is his own greatness. The real summit is atop his own head. 

Looking out at the sea, he decides that the only way to get there is to go under. So he heads to sea.

On the vision and the riddle

He has a vision of a dwarf on his chest and it leads him to a road. He decides that each direction that a road goes in it insults the other direction. Every road is an attack on itself. 

But the vision ends with a man who seems to break the hold time has on him, and when he achieves that he becomes more than a man, laughing maniacally. The riddle is: who is the man who can break time? 

One line

“Ah, you amiable fool, Zarathustra, you all-too-blindly confiding one! But you have always been thus: you have always approached every terrible thing confidently!” —Zarathustra, to Zarathustra

• This is probably too facile, but here in the middle of the book, Zarathustra seems to be a bit fascinated by evil. I wonder if the idea that we're meant to get here is that good — for all its goodness — tends toward conformity and uniformity.
• Whereas evil, for all its badness, can also break loose. In its aberrance, it is free, and by freeing itself there's the hope of attaining a new height.
• Which explains the relationship between greatness and loneliness. 

—Brady Dale
October 15, 2026

Next Zarathustra: Godlike desires