Human, monologue, Second Scene

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HUMAN:
That's how they sound to me
For three years now
The serious, meaningful words.
They sound to me from the solid ground of the earth
And from the air and water.
Just as the life forces of plants
Are mysteriously enclosed in their seeds,
So the lofty ideas
That I have allowed to work
In my soul for ten years
Have coalesced into this one sentence:
Human, know thyself.
The everyday call thoughts
foggy formations, produced in the human brain,
They contrast them
with the powerful world of passions
and the full, sensual experience;
They believe that these determine
people's true interests
and changing fortunes,
And any structure of ideas appears gray to them.
I have experienced it differently.
I could easily find myself
In everything that everyday life
Shakes the heart in its deepest core.
My soul is little touched
By the consequences of love and hate,
Which in everyday life
Seem powerful
And forge destinies.
But the gigantic power of thought
Has carried me into spheres of destiny,
Higher than everyday loves and strivings;
It has shown me delights
That no heart can ever feel
Seen only through the eyes.
It has also shown me terror,
Against which is child's play,
What otherwise smashes people
To the ground.
I know that it is only appearance,
When one speaks of ideas,
Which embodies for me in primeval worlds
The becoming of the earth and of man.
I first heard words from
Long-gone incarnations of the earth.
The words became messengers to me
From hidden spheres of the world.
Their powers ran through my veins
And lived in my pulse,
As otherwise only blood substance lives,
And in my own thoughts
I felt the weaving of secret worlds.
I believed I had only learned,
But little by little I felt
That I had become a different being.
Like the shell of this being
The human being appeared to me,
Who I once was.
I could observe him,
As I once observed beings,
That presented themselves to my eye.
But I was transported into vast spaces.
The fire of distant earthly times
I could feel
And see how it
Boiled the blood of my daytime self.
The air filled with light
I could see —
And the origin of my thoughts
Came before my soul.
And what was once only water to me,
Was revealed to me by the spirits,
Who gave me my consciousness.
And all this was not a gray doctrine,
Was personal fate.
Was close to me,
As close to man
Is the warm heart of a friend.
I had left my old being behind.
A new one seemed to be born from me,
And everything that had changed me,
It changed itself into the echo,
Which now resounds to me from my new world:
Man, know thyself.
I once feared
The worlds of gods and spirits;
This fear is long gone.
It went into the abyss
With everything I once desired,
With everything I once hated.
But from the abyss
A being now looks at me
More terrible than all the demons' host,
More terrifying than all descriptions
Of human horror.
What I myself once was,
What I believed I had left behind,
It stares at me gruesomely
With terrifying glances
From the depths of the abyss.
That is me.
I have heard of the chains
That once bound Prometheus
To the rocky ground of the Caucasus.
These chains seem insignificant to me,
I feel myself forged
To my own abysmal self.
Yes, there you float,
Terrible monster.
You kill me like destructive poison
The last trace of my will.
Icy forces penetrate my limbs
Mocking
Consume all my feelings,
I want to escape the earth
To spiritually pure heights.
And when I clearly
Believed I could see
The noble worlds of ideas,
You spread with your vapors
A black mist,
And my soul becomes blind.