I Wish To Be At Any Time

What, If Some Day Or Night A Demon Were To Steal After You Into Your Loneliest Loneliness And Say To You: 'this Life As You Now Live It And Have Lived It, You Will Have To Live Once More And Innumerable Times More' ... Would You Not Throw Yourself Down And Gnash Your Teeth And Curse The Demon Who Spoke Thus? Or Have You Once Experienced A Tremendous Moment When You Would Have Answered Him: 'you Are A God And Never Have I Heard Anything More Divine.

He Who Knows Not How To Plant His Will In Things At Least Endows Them With Some Meaning: That Is To Say, He Believes That A Will Is Already Present In Them (a Principle Of Faith.)

Such A Man As Instinctively Feeds On Pure Ambrosia And Leaves Alone The Indigestible In Things.

It Is Only Great Pain--that Slow, Sustained Pain That Takes Its Time, In Which We Are, As It Were, Burned With Smoldering Green Firewood--that Forces Us Philosophers To Sink To Our Ultimate Profundity And To Do Away With All The Trust, Everything Good-natured, Veil-imposing, Mild And Middling, On Which We May Have Previously Based Our Humanity. I Doubt That Such A Pain Makes Us 'better'--but I Know That It Makes Us Deeper.

What I Really Want From Music: That It Be Cheerful And Profound Like An Afternoon In October.