On the first day, he entered the amphitheater respectably, suited in a greenish-grey plaid, bespectacled and composed against the cacophony of applause. It was obvious that a great deal of effort had gone into bringing this man back into the present realm. Not a painful or sacrificial effort, but an excited and engaged one, utilizing the same creatively destructive energy which is put into making paint vibrant, or the same selfishly enlightened devotion required to transform a tree into a piece of artful furniture.

It was too soon tragically evident however that his features were distorted by the innocent and omniscient disorientation of one who has recently been born. With silently ascetic lamentation he seemed to will himself into existence. Infinite paradoxes broke upon his face like waves upon a consciously morphing sand. If he had reduced himself to a guttural scream in any one of that first day’s tortuous moments (an outcome which seemed at any level of perception to be a reasonable reaction to his circumstance) the maternal creatures of the audience would have started involuntarily lactating, if only to corporealize their own vital necessity for his being.

On the second day, he stood silently before the crowd of whispering admirers, students, learners, previously-indifferent onlookers, and critics. The critics most of all were crushed by his innocence. They were expecting a nihilistic devil, a damner of damnation, a rationalizer of irrationalization. But they were presented with an individual who could not be categorized. Many would-be deviants even fled the scene in horror; the vacancy of his expression mirroring their own numerous self-denials. The ones who were left were in love or in hate with him in various ways; even the stoics felt as worshippers should feel, standing on the precipice of some unknowable knowledge, some philosopher’s stone, which might have the capacity to favorably alter perception and quantify existence if only it could be grasped and understood. The faithful and the skeptics alike waited patiently for the object of their idolization to reanimate.

On the third day, his face grew in understanding at an impossibly rapid rate; a toddler learning to be an effective adult in the space of days or seconds, through nothing more than the power of his own observation. This evident intellectual growth fostered undeniable sensitivity on the parts of all beating hearts in attendance. Still he was silent, his audience expectant. It was as though he was arduously relearning the long-emaciated practice of condensing thoughts into words.

On the fourth day, his moustache quivered. A wave of sympathetic adoration rippled through the Maenads of the front row, who yearned to claim his sweat and use it to lubricate their own blissful suffering.

On the fifth day, he finally spoke, though it was obviously a terrible and frightening occurrence for him.

inaudibly he whispered to himself before beginning:

“What matter about thyself Zarathustra? Say thy word and break into pieces.”

then he started, with overwhelming contempt for the drama and inadequacy of his words,

“If I were to remove this clothing,

what would be left but a whole thing?

Something to be loved or hated,

attracted to or repelled by,

gained or lost?

Something self-creative and simultaneously self-destructive?”

With keen awareness of the danger inherent in his violation of precedent, he began to remove his clothes, as though they were the starting notes of a grand symphony, a covering which served only as a ceremonial introduction to a deeper and more intrinsic reality which was about to be revealed by his nakedness. The entire audience, from the most pious debauchee to the most simpering admirer, were struck speechless. The clothes in which the historical experts and make-up artists had maternally and lovingly swaddled the object of their devotion were strewn carelessly about the stage in a fit of raw and truthful animosity. Apollo had become Dionysis. A superman stood before the crowd, extraordinary in his ordinariness. The godlike anti-christ displayed an indescribable combination of pride and humiliation. A struggle for the natural world to overwhelm the civil; for strength to conquer fear; for the masculine to reassert itself over it’s own lust for feminism. Several proficient artists tried to capture the courageous dangle of his scrotum, but were unable to relate the imperceptibly personal tremble which will remain forever lost to time. The Maenads swooned, and in carnal response to their moaning encouragement he slowly expanded from his terrified retraction into a powerful and penetrative grandeur.

On the sixth day he continued his speech, the stunned audience searching their brains for the context of his first words, which had been immediately forgotten in the wake of this unbelievable revelation of being.

“If I were to then go one step further,

The natural next step,

And remove my skin

would you not be shocked and at once in love with my tenacity?”

With that, and only that, he tore, bare fingered, at his chest, until he was literally ripping his skin from his flesh. Blood dripped upon the stage as he peeled himself asunder, but no-one dared stop the holy spectacle. The mothers of the audience wept; they too understood and were attracted to the vitality of his closeness to death; but unlike the Maenads, their feminine instinct gave them an intense desire to see him flourish; they willed for him to be both alive and simultaneously at peace.

On the seventh day the idolators’ bloody-spectacled savior laughed; at first it was a meniacal, superior laugh; the laugh of an intellectual over his subordinates. Then almost at once, with a depreciating spasm, this egotistical laugh morphed into an inviting one; a laugh of friendship and camaraderie, a laugh of a self-informed evil admiring some long forsaken good. His last words were recorded for the posterity of the very enlightenment which he had always held in such bitterness:

“You have made me a god, and I deserve it;

I deserve the ultimate suffering for showing you that all gods are dead,

So too, am I dead,

And not only dead,

But forced to endure sanity once more.”

He bled out then, losing consciousness from his singularly potent lacerations.

Like Dionysus, he was now twice-born to us. Once mortally, by mortal means, in perpetual suffering, and again ethereally, idealistically, from a loving knee. It was a counter-intuitive finding that the second birth, the painless birth, was the source which brought with it the highest capacity for destruction. Are the most terrible things which occur in humanity not born out of spite from a painful existence, but out of boredom resulting from the perception of a complete and attainable knowledge?

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The first four lines of the incomprehensibly arrogant and unforgivably inadequate response to “The Assignment”... which was (in the student’s defense) unvoiced by the teacher:

In his previous life, Nietzsche once said of Christ:

“He died too early. He himself would have revoked his doctrine had he reached a riper age. Noble enough to revoke he was, but death had other plans.”

As much as he detested the Christian God, and indeed all forms of enfeebled martyrdom, there was a part of him who still held on to the imperatively heroic idea that if he descended to the lowest bowels of hellish pain and emerged from that madness with any morsel of self-knowledge he would have attained a unique wisdom, and be worshipped and loved for his sacrifice.

He was not wrong.

“You still do not see him.”

Seeming to disappear in the dim light, Nietzsche spoke slowly, raspily. His larynx had been idle, had decayed for so long. We wondered: perhaps the rasp was disuse, perhaps it was a side effect. We wondered, too, whom we did not see, and how we could find out, and whether we could remember Nietzsche’s words clearly enough to research and annotate them later. We were forbidden our phones. The screens would have cheapened the dark of the room, anyway, which was illuminated only by candles at the philosopher’s request. For reasons we did not know, our professors had left a single laptop running, and its muted glare seemed false. Profane.

“The madman with the lantern,” Nietzsche said. “He cries out even now, I am looking for God! I am looking for God! and the people in the marketplace”—he gestured widely with his arms—“the people in this absurd marketplace laugh, until he says, We are murderers, we have killed him: God is dead.”

Nietzsche flickered, then. We had not trusted our eyes the first time, but as his arms dropped he flickered as surely as the candle flames, out and in of existence. I heard gasps, one whisper, a sharp signal to hush. We did not know how much longer it could last, and no word could be spared.

“My madman cried of the murder of God. Lightning and thunder require time, the light…” He closed his eyes and his body swayed. Nietzsche might have flickered again.

He gestured toward the corner with his fingers, and Professor Hamblin dutifully read the passage; after Nietzsche’s throated murmur, he seemed nearly to shout. “Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars, and yet they have done it themselves. They—” The professor cut off; Nietzsche had raised his fingers.

“I thought he was too early. In my time, the people gaped in astonishment to hear the madman, hushed as he hurled his lantern to the ground and knew not what to say because they could not see or hear. But you…

“You still do not know what to say,” he rasped on, “but you are not silent. You scream and you wail, and you grasp the shards of the madman’s lantern and slice his throat as you snarl, God is alive! God is alive! And as the madman’s blood flows into the soil, you raise your misshapen lumps of clay, and you cry, Look upon the face of God!”

Like the others, I held an envelope I had been given when I entered, and I fumbled with it, my hands sweating. Weak though he was, his stare withered us all.

“Your greatest men are last men, Letzer Mensch who tell you they will return your greatness or reveal the path or uncover or re-cover the abyss, and they raise up their clay and scream, Look upon the face of God!They smell God’s decomposition most strongly of all, and create God anew with their pitiful mud so that even as God rots in the earth, each person claims to have seen him. The people will jab shards of the madman’s lantern deep in their eyes before they will dare to look. They will worship septillion lumpen gods before they will admit the death of one. The Letzer Mensch smell this submission just as they smell God’s putrid flesh, and they hear the clink of silver in the pretense. They know in what comfort they can live if they claim greatness.

“You insist you know truth; you insist you know God. You know nothing but rot and clay!” He stood fully upright. He flickered twice and willed a depth into his rasp, so that it inhabited our skulls and grew within us. “Your thumbs scamper day and night over illuminated glass to recruit more and lesser acolytes; you seek augmentation by birthing lambs for your shepherd. Rot! Clay!

“You flock to this hall to hear Nietzsche. You think it is Nietzsche you read. You hear an echo and you think it is Nietzsche who speaks! Fools!” He flickered again, and again, and as he faded away I thought I heard him cry “Fools!” once more.

We stood in the candlelight, gazing to the spot where Nietzsche did not stand. I heard paper tear behind me, and then to my left and all around. I opened my own envelope and read the words printed there.

The God you worship is false, as all gods are. Write an essay about this truth. Then burn your essay. Sharpen your nerve and knife; kill God.