“Have we ever complained because we are misunderstood, misjudged, misidentified, slandered, misheard, and not heard? Precisely this is our fate — oh, for a long time yet! It is also our distinction; we should not honor ourselves sufficiently if we wished that it were otherwise. We are misidentified — because we ourselves keep growing, keep changing, we shed our old bark, we shed our skins every spring, we keep becoming younger, fuller of future, taller, stronger, we push our roots ever more powerfully into the depths — into evil— while at the same time we embrace the heavens ever more lovingly, more broadly, imbibing their light ever more thirstily with all our twigs and leaves. Like trees we grow — this is hard to understand, as is all of life — not in one place only but everywhere, not in one direction but equally upward and outward and inward and downward; our energy is at work simultaneously in the trunk, branches, and roots; we are no longer free to do only one particular thing, to be only one particular thing. This is our fate, as I have said; we grow in height; and even if this should be our fatality — for we dwell ever closer to the lightning — well, we do not on that account honor it less; it remains that which we do not wish to share, to make public — the fatality of the heights, our fatality.”