December 12, 1894

  My hero will not be enchained by the loves of Plato, Anacreon or
Hafiz.  Indeed, he will rein in his blind instincts by the will of his noble,
heroic sensibilities and thoughts. The hero shall love the maiden's lofty
feelings and profound ideas, her resolute, conscious volition and her ex­uberant gaze - a gaze brimming with tears and smiles - just as he does
the ethical-supermanly in the male. He shall love with all the exalted
powers of his being, but that love shall be purely out of compassion.
Indeed, he is Superman; he is incapable of being astounded by mortals
as well as being worshipful of them, but to love with compassion bestows
honor upon him.

           With his beloved who embodies his dreams, at least in part, he
shall conjoin in the period of his blossoming creativity for the sake of humanity's perpetuity. He will conjoin with exuberance and with tears, and
that unity which represents a sanctity for the Superman - or a sacred,
conscious, deferential feeling - will <occur> once or twice, at most thrice
in his whole life, in the period of his creativity...

           Indeed! The knowledge that the hero conjoins with his beloved inspires him, that from two heroes will come forth a third - the fruit of heroes
<...> The hero is spirited by giving life to another, by witnessing his own perpetuity in another. For the hero there exists family, hearth, and the
sanctities and joys which they represent. The hero - his life is short, so is
the lifespan of lightning, of Vulcan, or of a flood, to be sure. The hero,
during his childhood and adolescence, grows up, develops his body and
soul. During that time, he comes to know life, mankind and nature. That
is the period of his learning. Thereafter begins his summer, the period of
his creativity and productivity (20-25 until 45-50; from 25 to 50 years of
age, or from 20 until 45) until that age when he feels himself old and
gradually begins to regress; his heroism declines, he becomes an in­-
valid, a hero deprived of a crown. During the period of old age (45-70)
nothing stimulates him anymore, there is no exuberance within him. Now he wants to lead a contented life: to eat, to drink, to sleep and to enjoy in
comfort. He dies an unheroic death...But the hero shall not die that way.
During the period of his creativeness, he will create a whole series of
Bonders, and he will die in the field, in the battle for ideas, in the depths
of musings.  When he journeys toward the stars in order to explore, let
him die there. When he is doing battle in the field, let him die there...

           He will die in such a way that he will not have died, that death from
life will not be distinguished directly...He is lightning, he flashes, thunders
and is buried at sea; but the lightning never expired, died, until its fall into
the sea. The hero shall die like a hero in battle, before the bench of
knowledge with the knife of analysis in hand. It is a shame for the hero
when, in his old-age which lacks glory, he has to look back to the past,
glorious days and live at the expense of that past. It is unbearable when
the hero realizes that he is still on earth but that he is a powerless, mind­less milksop, a corpse, a debilitated engine. The exuberance and the aspiration toward the good, the exalted, must exist in the hero, must be inseparable from him just as energy is inseparable from matter. It is an embarrassment for the hero that he should be in love in order to be spir­ited just as many a moralist demands. No, that is merely the behavior of milksops who require electricity in order to be stimulated. The hero in whom there is a whole world becomes spirited spontaneously from deep within himself, because of the indispensable demands of his own emotions and thoughts. He becomes spirited by his own will. Spiritedness is inseparable from the hero, it is born in him. The hero is matter, spirited-
ness - his strength, while the two together [make up] the hero's essence <...> The hero shall be a sun generating light on his own and burning, while all the rest - girls and music - are the scraps and falling stars which the sun devours. In the universal bosom of the hero, girls and music are atoms and cannot even emit a moment's warmth. No, it is the hero who even conducts heat to them and dissolves them within himself. Let us not forget that the maiden is the hero's companion...

          The heroine shall never resort to artificial-cultural means to beau­tify herself. That is falsity and not heroism... Beauty that is the heroine's plumage which elegant nature has endowed her. Let her not distort nat­ural beauty by mistaken skill. Genuine skill is the natural way. The heroine shall not wear a corset in order to enlarge her bosom. Indeed, her bosom already swells with exuberance. The heroine shall not pomade her hair so that it glistens, nor shall she pattern it. Dawn's dew glistens already upon her long hair and, like waves, it ripples in the wind. Of what use is sweet-scented pharmacopoeia to the heroine? To be
sure, from her - her eyes and bosom - the fragrance of grief and smile
scent sacredness and exuberance. The heroine shall not exaggerate the
moves and swings of her gait. Uplifted as she is, she shall glide on high,
above people, at which time, embraced by the rainbow, she shall move
like the clouds. The heroine shall not falsify her voice by affectation. To
be sure, at moments of grief and elation, her voice murmurs deeply like a
forest and thunders like the sea. The heroine shall not apply cosmetics
to her face for, at moments of grief and exuberance, dew and radiance
are aglow there; her eyes, like the whole star-studded sky, glitter. Not a
single falsity; in her uniqueness, in her essence, the heroine is a heroine
Of beauty, of nobility, of  sublimeness. Is it worthwhile possibly to exchange the lily of innocence and saintliness with the mud of defilement and wickedness, and applying it on the cheeks, the forehead and lips? Never...In nature, the heroine is exquisite like nature itself, so is the hero.

           Shushik and I were drawn together like a magnet by passion.
However, being virtuous, we choked that wild passion and loved each
other with the greatest of sentiments and notions which were marked by
grief, beauty and profound notions. We dissolved our sexual passion in
our moral feelings and more than doubled its force. We loved one an­other more fervently and deeply and remained farther apart from the de­sire of union. But I wonder whether we were capable of responding in a fundamental and serious way to questions of our reason. The questions: Is it possible that your love which perhaps rests upon passion has within itself a genuine, spiritual sympathy? Is it possible that your personalities are compatible? Are your ideals the same? Are you educational backgrounds compatible? Is there perhaps conscious­ness-logic in your love? Respond... Oh, answers are most difficult and their af­firmation doubtful
even though we believed that we were spiritually one whole, one harmony. When the presence of love wears thin in the after­math of kisses, of holding hands or, eventually, after many years beyond the initial dramatic union, is there a crumb left of the old worshipfulness, of love? Or does it all fall by the wayside along with the veil of the bride? There, this is when true love shows, otherwise, all the rest - the quench­less former songs, the tears, the dreams and the sacred longings - are shadows favoring the development of elusive, uncouth passion, even intoxicating love so that a few moments' separation becomes already unendurable, despairing...

             Questions, questions, and questions..!

          The hero shall never be so blinded that he views life, humanity
and the world just optimistically or pessimistically. The hero shall weep
and smile, despair and be resolute. For example, he becomes animated
by nature's exquisiteness but feeling that nature will turn into dust, that
the forces at work within it are fortuitous, following one another blindly,
that there is a great struggle among them, that the whole organic world is devouring itself and being devoured by nature...He sees that all that has
no purpose. He sees that in nature there exists passion which is blind
and despotic...that there is no anchor for the thinker, that many a time our intellect is laughing at us, at nature, while nature has us in the palm of her hand and is playing with us. The hero sees that instinct, too, is malevolent, dishonorable, yet gaining control of instinct is sad and aimless. Before beauty, the hero shall neither amuse himself nor shall he be exalted. He despises amusement and he already is noble. Faced with beauty he saddens for that beauty is transitional or without content. The hero loves the maiden, he is spirited by ideals, but he is aware that that spiritedness was not founded upon consciousness; it was founded instead upon instinct, and instinct led him toward union. He united, why? The hero responds: for the perpetuity of humanity. But then, why did the hero love, weep, and become animated? Solely for the sake of contributing one more member to mankind or for the sake of preserving the genus. All this was committed unconsciously, the result of which was the preservation of the genus...But, in fact, he was capable of behaving consciously for this purpose. He could have come to know the woman with whom he conjoined, he could have come to love her emotional physiog­nomy so that the hero's offspring would also be heroes. However, the hero loved the woman in the name of ideals, even though the hero's ideals were not present in the woman. There was in her a procreative magnet. She abandoned the hero, the hero was deceived, he was deceived gloriously, with ideals and spiritedness. She deceived him - what a pity, what a pity...

           In the name of ideals, truth, conscience, nobility, purity and erudition, the hero embraced his beloved, but the consequence of it and the true reason were revealed. It was for the sake of perpetuating the species...The hero was deceived. To be sure, he could have generated enthusiasm for the proposition of perpetuating the species and sought one compatible for the purpose. The hero, at first, has to know the woman thoroughly. He has to be in sympathy with her, have disputes
and despise her shortcomings; he has to whip and embrace her with the
fervor of a truly noble person, then conjoin in the name of procreation...The hero despairs that he does not have freedom of will, but he also is joyful for not having it. He curses and feels debased for being de­pendent upon nutriment and the climate for his spiritual, creative powers. He also is overjoyed, saddened and overjoyed, because of the fact that matter and energy are identical. He is saddened and overjoyed by death as well as by life. He is saddened and overjoyed by nature's death, its end and destruction. The hero does not know what to say and for that reason he is both happy and sad. He despises himself, he adores himself. He is saddened that there is poetry in nature, but he is joyous be­cause of it. He would have been elated if nature had had a purpose and logic, but he would have been saddened because of it...

         The hero is one total wound, a deep wound! He does not know
whether to be happy or sad...

         Along with thousands of quite knotty issues, I will, among others, focus particularly upon the following: WHAT IS NIRVANA
(OLDENBERG, BUDDA)? WHAT IS THE WILL (SCHOPENHAUER)? WHAT IS PLATONIC LOVE (Plato, Mantegazza, Drummond)? WHAT
IS INSTINCT (HARTMANN)? What is respect, love, hatred, spirited-ness... (SPINOZA, LEIBNIZ, SPENCER, WUNDT, PAULSEN)? What is
the "I", altruism, EGOISM? What is the soul, feeling, the mind, desire (WUNDT, SPENCER)? What is poetry, aesthetics, logic (HEGEL, VISCHER)? What is artifice, culture? What is nature, beauty, healthfulness?

         In my opinion, the Superman shall be invigorated by life and by death, that is by those principles of the beginning and the end, and which are in him, and concern him. The hero shall be animated therefore by the powers within him, or by the idea that he has life within himself which is active, thinking and feeling. The hero shall be invigorated by his ego, he shall lean upon ego, he shall observe and judge, he shall feel and think through it. It is not honorable for the hero that a maiden, a song, a rock motivate him to aspire for life, exhilaration...The hero's heart is an ocean and, at most, shall cause a wave or two. No, the hero shall love them, be compassionate and of assistance, but without his "I" or his deep self-knowledge and self-recognition, his self-restraint and unerring volition. <If> he were inspired merely by them, he no longer would be a hero. The hero hugs the whole world against his bosom; he embraces on its behalf, because he is exhilarated.

         No matter how much Platonic love suffers in my esteem, I desire to see very little moral difference between it and eroticism; and I confess with my heart crossed that only virtuous people are capable of loving like Nadson while the not so virtuous love like Plato. Kissing the maiden has a place in Plato's love, while in Nadson's love, tears and grief do. Platonic love is not based so much upon blind passion; emotional attractions, similarities in personality, too, play a big role. The first step toward love, though, is beauty; the step toward worshipfulness is geniality, the harmony of personalities; sexual longing, on the other hand, comprises the fervor, the powerful magnet. The love sung by Hafiz, Bodenstedt, represents one great sexual yearning, union. Neither deference nor grief exist there, just the attraction of beauty and the great yearning for inter­course which does not reveal itself clearly but proceeds like lightning.

        If the hero's mother and a few of his dearest friends were to die, the hero would not commit suicide. He would endure the blow. To be sure, he has yet unfinished heroisms to commit, but profound grief, like rust, eats away at his heart, and the hero - day and night - like a candle at the head of a casket, glimmers, burns away sadly. He burns away like a candle in the temple of learning, at the moment of being creative, at the workshop, as well as in dreams and on the battlefield...

         I will try to love exceedingly my mother, my friends, my lady-
friends, the villager and the bard, my homeland and erudition, nature
and the fine arts, and I will find out whether these won't satisfy my heart with sweet feeling as much as Shushik's love did in the winter of 1891-1892.
   

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