HAVE
WE EVER COMPLAINED because we are
misunderstood, misjudged, misidentified, slandered,
misheard, and not heard? Precisely this is our fate –
oh, for a long time yet! It is also our distinction; we
should not honor ourselves sufficiently if we wished that
it were otherwise. We are misidentified – because we
ourselves keep growing, keep changing, we shed our old
bark, we shed our skins every spring, we keep becoming
younger, fuller of future, taller, stronger, we push our
roots ever more powerfully into the depths – into
evil – while at the same time we embrace the heavens
ever more lovingly, more broadly, imbibing their light ever
more thirstily with all our twigs and leaves. Like trees we
grow – this is hard to understand, as is all of life
– not in one place only but everywhere, not in one
direction but equally upward and outward and inward and
downward; our energy is at work simultaneously in the
trunk, branches, and roots; we are no longer free to do
only one particular thing, to be only one particular thing.
This is our fate, as I have said; we grow in height; and
even if this should be our fatality – for we dwell
ever closer to the lightning – well, we do not on
that account honor it less; it remains that which we do not
wish to share, to make public – the fatality of the
heights, our fatality.