Women and their action at a distance. – Do I still have ears? Am I all ear and nothing else? Here I stand amidst the fire of the surf, whose white flames are licking at my feet: from all sides it is howling, threatening, screaming, shrieking at me, while the old earth-rattler2 sings his aria in the lowest of depths, deep as a roaring bull, while pounding such an earth-rattling beat that the hearts of even these weather-beaten monsters of the rocks are trembling in their bodies. Suddenly, as if born out of nothingness, there appears before the gate of this hellish labyrinth only a few fathoms away a large sailing ship, gliding along as silently as a ghost. Oh, this ghostly beauty! How magically it touches me! What? Has all the calm and silence of the world embarked here? Is my happiness itself sitting in this quiet place – my happier self, my second, immortalized self?3 Not yet to be dead, but also no longer alive? As a spiritlike, silent, watching, gliding, hovering intermediate being? As though I were that ship that moves over the dark sea with its white sails like an enormous butterfly! Yes! To move over existence! That’s it! That would be it! – It seems as though the noise here has made me into a dreamer? All great noise makes us place happiness in silence and distance. When a man stands in the midst of his own noise, in the midst of his own surf of projects and plans, he is also likely to see gliding past him silent, magical creatures whose happiness and seclusion he yearns for – women. He almost believes that his better self lives there amongst the women: in these quiet regions even the loudest surf turns into deathly silence and life itself into a dream about life. Yet! Yet! My noble enthusiast, even on the most beautiful sailing ship there is so much sound and noise, and unfortunately so much small, petty noise! The magic and the most powerful effect of women is, to speak the language of the philosophers, action at a distance, *actio in distans:*4 but that requires, first and foremost – distance!