You Fools and Idiots of Time

I ask you, what have you done?

From Rüdiger Safranki’s Nietzsche:

Nietzsche was sitting in the corner of the sofa in his room, his head resting on his hand, his mind's eye reviewing scenes from the past year. Absorbed in the past, he suddenly became aware of his surroundings and saw someone lying on his bed, softly moanly and gasping. A dying man! Shadows whispered and murmured to the dying man from every direction. And then he knew: the old year is dying. A few moments later, the bed is empty. It gets light again, the walls of the room recede, and a voice says: "You fools and idiots of time, which is nowhere but in your heads! I ask you, what have you done? If you want to be and have what you hope for, what you await, do it.”

What would you do if time was but a man dying right in front of you?

“Perhaps,” says Nietzsche, “genius is not so very rare: perhaps what is rare is the five hundred bands needed to tyrannize over the kairos, ‘the right time’ — to take chance by the forelock!”

What would you do if time was but a delicate flower, a rose, its petals dropping slowly, one by one, until all that remained was its thorns?

The flower calls for delicacy; it calls for care. But the water — the water calls for action. The water calls for tyranny.

It is the storms who water the flowers. The lakes and the oceans, together with the sun and the earth, provide for the clouds. But it is the storms, the clouds, and the thunder who water the flowers.

The Youth of Bacchus, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1884