Page 54 - beyond-good-and-evil

actions of love and of an extravagant magnanimity after
which nothing can be wiser than to take a stick and thrash
the witness soundly: one thereby obscures his recollection.
Many a one is able to obscure and abuse his own memo-
ry, in order at least to have vengeance on this sole party in
the secret: shame is inventive. They are not the worst things
of which one is most ashamed: there is not only deceit be-
hind a mask—there is so much goodness in craft. I could
imagine that a man with something costly and fragile to
conceal, would roll through life clumsily and rotundly like
an old, green, heavily-hooped wine-cask: the refinement of
his shame requiring it to be so. A man who has depths in
his shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon
paths which few ever reach, and with regard to the exis-
tence of which his nearest and most intimate friends may be
ignorant; his mortal danger conceals itself from their eyes,
and equally so his regained security. Such a hidden nature,
which instinctively employs speech for silence and conceal-
ment, and is inexhaustible in evasion of communication,
DESIRES and insists that a mask of himself shall occupy
his place in the hearts and heads of his friends; and suppos-
ing he does not desire it, his eyes will some day be opened to
the fact that there is nevertheless a mask of him there—and
that it is well to be so. Every profound spirit needs a mask;
nay, more, around every profound spirit there continually
grows a mask, owing to the constantly false, that is to say,
SUPERFICIAL interpretation of every word he utters, ev-
ery step he takes, every sign of life he manifests.