A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN TWO CORNERS
wandering in the wilderness-for the flesh pots of Egypt, and her tem–
ples, pyramids, and mummies, and for all the Egyptian wisdom and
initiations. Like Moses, you have tasted of this wisdom, of these initia–
tions, and yet you would forget everything; you hate Egypt-you have
come to feel aversion for the mummified "culture" with its wisdom that
does not quench
your
thirst.
What a difference between you and Nietzsche, whose burden, which
is as alien to you as is all Egypt, you were consistent in not attempting
to lift on your shoulders, which even without it are excessively loaded
by the burden of spiritual values and monuments. Wherefore would you
undertake hand in hand with him the dangerous pilgrimage into the
cavern of the Sphinx, whose singing riddle ("who and what are you,
stranger?"-Oedipus answered: "a man ... ") strikes up a special,
dif–
ferent melody for each one who presents himself. Of course, Nietzsche's
problem is your problem: culture and individuality, value, decline and
health, especially health. And hardly any initiation of individuality in
our present cultural milieu can take place without the "initiate's" (as
the theosophists say) meeting him as "the guardian of the threshold."
Nietzsche said: "Man is something that must be 'transcended'"–
and thereby once more testified that the road of the liberation of the
individual is a road to the heights and depths, a movement along a
vertical line. Again an obelisk, again a pyramid! "Possible, quite pos–
sible!"-you hurriedly dismiss the question, for your loins are girded;
and your ardent eyes measure the horizons of the wildemess-"first of
all, I must get out of here, out of Egypt."
If
you had been at any time and even if only
in
part a Nietzschean,
you would have felt that in man, culture's beast of burden, who ex–
hibits the shape of a camel (the smile is Nietzsche's, the pathos is yours)
lion's claws cut through; you would have perceived how there awak–
ens in him the elemental desert-like hunger of the predatory animal,
which compels him to tear into pieces something alive, somethir.g
heretofore feared, and to taste of its blood. This living and blood-filled
"something" is called in the abstract language of the New Egypt, in
its priestly books, "values": for they are wondrously vital and alive, since,
as you have said, mankind has saturated them with its living blood, and
breathed its fiery soul into them, although they sit motionless, on their
thrones, as "graven images, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven
above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the
earth." But Nietzsche is not only a wrecker, a blood-drinker, and a
psychophage: he is a legislator. Even before becoming the "Youth"
that, according to his forecast, the lion must tum into, he breaks the
103.5
