30
Truly, I dislike also those who call everything good and this world the best of
all. I call such people the all-contented.
All-contentedness that knows how to taste everything: that is not the best taste! I
honour the obstinate, fastidious tongues and stomachs that have learned to say ‘I’ and
‘Yea’ and ‘No’.
But to chew and digest everything—that is to have a really swinish nature!
Always to say Ye-a—only the ass and those like him have learned that.
77
The herd at The Pied Cow is neither bovine nor porcine. They are Zarathustra’s asinine
friends. They are animals, but not like the proud and wise animals waiting for him at his
cave. They have tongues, but they have no taste. They have long, asinine ears, but they
hear nothing. They may have left Christian virtue behind, they may have abandoned the
nation-state as the ground for their friendships, but they do not hear the Dionysian song
of Zarathustra. We are reminded of a tale Nietzsche recounts elsewhere:
‘O Dionysus, divine one, why do you pull me by my ears?’ Ariadne once asked her
philosophic lover during one of those famous dialogues on Naxos. ‘I find a kind of humor
in your ears, Ariadne: why are they not even longer?’
77
Ibid., 212.
Convention