For behold, O Zarathustra! For your new lays there are needed new lyres.
Sing and bubble over, O Zarathustra, heal your soul with new lays: that you may bear your great fate, which has not yet been any one's fate!
For your animals know it well, O Zarathustra, who you are and must become: behold, you are the teacher of the eternal return,- that is now your fate!
That you must be the first to teach this teaching- how could this great fate not be your greatest danger and infirmity!
Behold, we know what you teach: that all things eternally return, and ourselves with them, and that we have already existed times without number, and all things with us.
You teach that there is a great year of Becoming, a prodigy of a great year; it must, like a sand-glass, ever turn up anew, that it may anew run down and run out:-
-So that all those years are like one another in the greatest and also in the small, so that we ourselves, in every great year, are like ourselves in the greatest and also in the small.
And if you would now die, O Zarathustra, behold, we know also how you would then speak to yourself:- but your animals beseech you not to die yet!
You would speak, and without trembling, buoyant rather with bliss, for a great weight and worry would be taken from you, you patientest one!-
'Now do I die and disappear,' would you say, 'and in a moment I am nothing. Souls are as mortal as bodies.
But the plexus of causes returns in which I am intertwined,- it will again create me! I myself pertain to the causes of the eternal return.
I come again with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle,
