Life Too Much With Us

     “Why so hard?” the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. “After all, are we not close kin?”
     Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: are you not after all my brothers?
     “Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so much denial, self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?
     And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable ones, how can you triumph with me?
     And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut and cut through, how can you one day create with me?
     For creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax.
     Blessedness to write on the will of millennia as on bronze — harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether hard.
     This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: become hard!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Third Part,
#29 (entire), p. 326.

     “At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he has so far felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his heaven on earth.
     “When the great man screams, the small man comes running with his tongue hanging from lasciviousness. But he calls it his ‘pity.’
     “The small man, especially the poet — how eagerly he accuses life with words! Hear him, but do not fail to hear the delight that is in all accusations. Such accusers of life — life overcomes with a wink. ‘Do you love me?’ she says impudently. ‘Wait a little while, just yet I have no time for you.’
     “Man is the cruelest animal against himself; and whenever he calls himself 'sinner' and 'cross-bearer' and 'penetent,' do not fail to hear the voluptuous delight that is in all such lamentation and accusation.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ibid., p. 330.

     Zarathustra rejects his guests, though together they form a kind of higher man compared to their contemporaries. He repudiates these men of great longing and nausea as well as all those who enjoy his diatribes and denunciations and desire recognition and consideration for being out of time with their time. What Nietzsche envisiges is the creator for whom all negation is merely incidental to his great affirmation: joyous spirits, "laughing lions."
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ibid., from translator's Preface to Part Four,
11. "The Welcome," p. 346.

....All these objects ... how can I explain? They inconvenience me; I would have liked them to exist less strongly, more dryly, in a more abstract way, with more reserve. The chestnut tree pressed itself against my eyes.... All things, gently, tenderly, were letting themselves drift into existence like those relaxed women who burst out laughing and say: "It's good to laugh," in a wet voice; they were parading, one in front of the other, exchanging abject secrets about their existence. I realized that there was no half-way house between non-existence and this flaunting abundance. If you existed, you had to exist all the way, as far as mouldiness, bloatedness, obscenity were concerned. In another  world, circles, bars of music keep their pure and rigid lines. But existence is a deflection. Trees, night-blue pillars, the happy bubbling of a fountain,.... all this somnolence, all these meals digested together, had its comic side ... Comic ... no: it didn't go as far as that, nothing that exists can be comic; it was like a floating anology, almost entirely elusive; with certain aspects of vaudeville. We were a heap of living creatures, irritated, embarrassed at ourselves, we hadn't the slightest reason to be there, none of us, each one, confused, vaguely alarmed, felt in the way in relation to the other. In the way: it was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these gates, these stones. In vain I tried to count the chestnut trees, to locate them by their relationship to the Vellada, to compare their height....
     And I — soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal thoughts — I, too, was In the way. Fortunately, I didn't feel it, although I realized it, but I was uncomfortable because I was afraid of feeling it (even now I am afraid — afraid that it might catch me behind my head and lift me up like a wave). I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. But even my death would have been In the way. In the way, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden.... I was In the way for eternity.
     The word absurdity is coming to life under my pen; a little ago, in the garden, I couldn't find it, but neither was I looking for it, I didn't need it: I thought without words, on things, with things.... And without formulating anything clearly, I understood that I had found the key to Existence, the key to my Nausea, to my own life. In fact, all that I could grasp beyond that returns to this fundamental absurdity....
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, pp. 172-173.