This morning I happened, for my own inscrutable reasons, to be researching examples of extreme longevity in the animal kingdom. One of the animals I read about was Hanako, a Japanese koi fish (i.e., a breed of carp) which lived to the age of 226.
Hours later, I read a few pages of Thus Spake Zarathustra during my lunch break and found this:
And when once Life asked me: "Who is she then, this Wisdom?" -- then said I eagerly: "Ah, yes! Wisdom!"
One thirsteth for her and is not satisfied, one looketh through veils, one graspeth through nets.
Is she beautiful? What do I know! But the oldest carps are still lured by her.
2 comments:
I wonder whether Nietzsche was quoting a tradition that Wisdom herself was a carp - hence able to attract boy-carps... There is something that strikes me as wise, in an Eastern sort of way, about big slow carps in a placid pool.
And this makes me think of a diggerelish poem from Robert Graves's WHite Goddess which sticks in the mind:
Circling the circlings of their fish
Nuns walk in white and pray:
For he is chaste as they,
Who was dark-faced and hot in Silvia's day,
And in his pool drowns each unspoken wish.
Yes, I remember that poem, too, though it's been ages since I read The White Goddess. I believe it had to do with his theory that Neptune was a god of cold-blooded fish and had replaced Poseidon, the god of warm-blooded sea-beasts.
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