Publisher's Synopsis
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (German: Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen, also translated as Thus Spake Zarathustra) is a philosophical novel by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed in four parts written and published between 1883 and 1885. Much of the work deals with ideas such as the "eternal recurrence of the same," the parable on the "death of God," and the "prophecy" of the Übermensch, which were first introduced in The Gay Science. Nietzsche himself considered Zarathustra to be his magnum opus. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the ideas of which first came to Nietzsche while walking on two roads surrounding Rapallo, was conceived while writing The Gay Science.[ii] More specifically, the concept of the eternal recurrence, which is the central idea of Zarathustra by Nietzsche's admission, first occurred to Nietzsche in Switzerland: he was inspired by the sight of a gigantic, towering, pyramidal rock-a "pyramidal block of stone"-while walking through the woods along the shores of Lake Silvaplana, in the Upper Engadine, a high alpine region whose valley floor is at 6,000 feet (1,800 m). As evidence of this, he made a small note that read "6,000 feet beyond man and time.
