My best-loved wickedness and art is it, that my silence hath learned not to betray itself by silence.

Clattering with diction and dice, I outwit the solemn assistants; all those stern watchers shall my will and purpose elude.

That no one might see down into my depth and into mine ultimate will—for that purpose did I devise the long clear silence.

Many a shrewd one did I find: he veiled his countenance and made his water muddy, that no one might see therethrough and thereunder.

But precisely unto him came the shrewder distrusters and nut-crackers: precisely from him did they fish his best-concealed fish!

But the clear, the honest, the transparent—these are for me the wisest silent ones; in them, so profound is the depth that even the clearest water doth not—betray it.

Thou snow-bearded, silent winter-sky, thou round-eyed white-head above me! Oh, thou heavenly simile of my soul and its wantonness!

And must I not conceal myself like one who hath swallowed gold—lest my soul should be ripped up?

Must I not wear stilts, that they may overlook my long legs—all those enviers and injurers around me?

Those dingy, fire-warmed, used-up, green-tinted, ill-natured souls—how could their envy endure my happiness!

Thus do I show them only the ice and winter of my peaks—and not that my mountain windeth all the solar girdles around it!

They hear only the whistling of my winter-storms, and know not that I also travel over warm seas, like longing, heavy, hot south-winds.

They commiserate also my accidents and chances—but my word saith: ‘Suffer the chance to come unto me; innocent is it as a little child!’

How could they endure my happiness, if I did not put around it accidents, and winter-privations, and bear-skin caps, and enmantling snowflakes—

If I did not myself commiserate their pity, the pity of those enviers and injurers—

—If I did not myself sigh before them, and chatter with cold, and patiently let myself be swathed in their pity!

This is the wise waggish-will and good-will of my soul that it concealeth not its winters and glacial storms; it concealeth not its chilblains either.

To one man, lonesomeness is the flight of the sick one; to another, it is the flight from the sick ones.

Let them hear me chattering and sighing with winter-cold, all those poor squinting knaves around me! With such sighing and chattering do I flee from their heated rooms.

Let them sympathise with me and sigh with me on account of my chilblains: ‘At the ice of knowledge will he yet freeze to death!’ So they mourn.

Meanwhile do I run with warm feet hither and thither on mine olive-mount; in the sunny corner of mine olive-mount do I sing, and mock at all pity.