Remain True to the Earth

Zarathustra is leaving town, and his students would like a blessing. What they get instead is an order: guard yourselves against me. Clancy Martin walks Book One's farewell speech through its three parts, why gold shines, what we owe the earth now that there is nowhere else to fly to, and why a beloved teacher is a hazard to the people who love him. Then, in conversation, Martin turns the speech on himself, on the younger man who read this book as a manual for living, and follows Rilke toward a warning about love itself: what happens to us when we hand another person too much of our solitude.