Re: Race report

I feel my inferior qualifications in this
respect - if I chose to be a married man, I should always choose a girl
already seduced, so that I would not have to begin my marriage by
seducing my wife. Marriage, to be sure, also expresses an idea; but in
relation to the idea of marriage that quality is altogether immaterial
which is the absolutely essential condition for my idea. Therefore, a
marriage ought never to be planned to begin as though it were the
beginning of a story of seduction. So much is sure: there is a seducer
for every woman. Happy is she whose good fortune it is to meet just him.



Through marriage, on the other hand, the gods win their victory. In it
the once seduced maiden walks through life by the side of her husband,
looking back at times, full of longing, resigned to her fate, until she
reaches the limit of life. She dies; but not in the same sense as man
dies. She is volatilized and resolved into that mysterious primal
element of which the gods formed her - she disappears like a dream, like
an impermanent shape whose hour is past. For what is woman but a dream,
and the highest reality withal! Thus does the erotic nature comprehend
her, leading her, and being led by her true existence, being an
illusion. Through her husband, on the other hand, she becomes a creature
of this world, and he through her.



Marvelous nature! If I did not admire thee, a woman would teach me; for
truly she is the venerabile of life. Splendidly didst thou fashion her,
but more splendidly still in that thou never didst fashion one woman
like another. In man, the essential is the essential, and insofar always
alike; but in woman the adventitious is the essential, and is thus an
inexhaustible source of differences. Brief is her splendor; but quickly
the pain is forgotten, too, even as though I had never felt it, when the
same splendor is proffered me anew. It is tr


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