Faced with a scholarly book. – We are not among those who have ideas only between books, stimulated by books – our habit is to think outdoors, walking, jumping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or right by the sea where even the paths become thoughtful. Our first question about the value of a book, a person, or a piece of music is: ‘Can they walk?’ Even more, ‘Can they dance?’ We rarely read; but are none the worse on that account – and oh, how quickly we guess how someone has come to his ideas; whether seated before the inkwell, stomach clenched, head bowed over the paper; and oh, how soon we’re done with his book! Cramped intestines betray themselves – you can bet on it – no less than stuffy air, closed ceilings, cramped spaces. – Those were my feelings just now as I closed a decent, scholarly book – grateful, very grateful, but also relieved… In a scholar’s book there is nearly always something oppressive, oppressed: the ‘specialist’ emerges somehow – his eagerness, his seriousness, his ire, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunchback – every specialist has his hump. Every scholarly book also reflects a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked. Look at the friends of your youth again, after they have taken possession of their speciality (Wissenschaft) Alas, in every case the reverse has also taken place! How they are now for all time possessed and obsessed by it! Grown into their corner, squashed beyond recognition, unfree, unstable, completely emaciated and jagged except for one spot that is paradigmatically round – one is moved and silenced when one sees them again that way. Above every craft, even one with a golden floor, is also a leaden ceiling that presses and presses on the soul until it becomes strangely and crookedly pressed. There is nothing to do about this. Don’t think you can evade such crippling through some educational artifice. One pays dearly for any kind of mastery on earth, where perhaps one pays too dearly for everything; one is master of one’s trade at the price of also being its victim. But you want things to be different – ‘cheaper’, above all more comfortable – not so, my dear contemporaries? Well, if so, you instantly get something different: instead of the craftsman and master, you get the man of letters, the dexterous, ‘polydexterous’ literary man who of course lacks the hunched back – notwithstanding the posture he assumes before you as the shop attendant of spirit and the ‘bearer’ of culture – the literary man of letters, who really is nothing but who ‘represents’ nearly everything, who acts and ‘stands in for’ the expert, who takes it upon himself in all modesty to make himself paid, honoured, and celebrated in place of the expert. No, my scholarly friends, I bless you even for your hunched backs! And for despising, as do I, the ‘literary men’ and culture parasites! And for not knowing how to make a business of the spirit! And for having opinions that cannot be translated into monetary terms! And for not representing anything that you are not! And because your only desire (Wille) is to become masters of your craft, with reverence for every type of mastery and competence and with ruthless rejection of anything specious, semi-genuine, meretricious, virtuoso-like, demagogical, or histrionic in litteris et artibus37 – of anything that cannot give you proof of its unconditional probity in discipline and prior training. (Not even genius can compensate for such a deficiency, however much it may blind people to it. One grasps this once one has watched our most talented painters and musicians up close, who nearly without exception manage through a cunning inventiveness of manners, stop-gap devices, and even principles, to acquire artificially and belatedly the appearance of such probity, such solidity of schooling and culture – without, of course, managing to deceive themselves, to silence forever their bad conscience. For surely you know? All great contemporary artists suffer from a bad conscience…)