Do you not see this path of night and emptiness opening before us? The cry of Nietzsche's madman still resounds: one bright morning, the man rose before dawn, rushed into the marketplace with a lantern in his hand, crying without cease: "I seek God! I seek God!" As several bystanders stood about the marketplace mocking him, he called out to them: where has he gone? Here I am seeking him, and he has fled like all children! He may cry God all he wants, he finds no one who takes his quest seriously. All these people stare at the lantern, laugh at his earnestness, ask him with irony: has God lost his way like a child? Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Perhaps he has embarked for America? Did he stumble? The madman leaps into their midst, fixing them with his gaze: "Where is God? I shall tell you! We have killed him, you and I! All of us are his murderers! But how did we do it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving? Away from all suns! Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideways, forward, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Must we not light lanterns in the morning? Must we not, as we dig the graves of God, become tombs and sepulchers ourselves?" "What have we done?" the madman asks the silent crowd. He continues his questions, heaping image upon image, with the terror of the one who has understood before everyone else what has just happened: the collapse of belief in God drags down the whole moral and metaphysical edifice that rested upon it. But one must read what follows, the most painful and most profound part: his listeners stare at him, dumbfounded; then he throws his lantern, which shatters into pieces on a stone, and he cries out: "I have come too early! My time is not yet come. This tremendous event is still on its way, it walks more slowly than the light of the stars; the stones themselves will need time to let it be heard. Thunder and light require time; the labor of the light of time; the deed, though done, still requires time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars — and yet they themselves have done it!" The same day, it is told, this madman entered several churches and there intoned his requiem for the buried God. Led out at last and called to account, he replied each time with the same words: "What after all are these churches, if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?" And so what becomes of our world, without its anchor? A series of new beginnings, perhaps; a playing-session, a world of children and artists, where one makes and unmakes, builds castles of sand and takes up the work again, without sorrow, with the innocence of play. What matters is not to mourn the death of the old gods, but to discover what their death makes possible: since the horizons have been wiped away, each must trace new ones; since the sea has been drained, we must learn to drink from our own well; since the old ground has given way, we must become our own ground, build upon ourselves, within ourselves, for ourselves. The madman, this poet of misfortune, speaks a terrible but liberating truth: what dies is merely an opinion, a belief, a representation; the world itself remains, and with it the possibility of new tables of values. Let us not weep over the erased horizon: the void is not a fall, it is an open field; the falling night is not the end, it is the invitation to light, each in his place, a lantern. And here the madman's lesson becomes a lesson in strength: yesterday's terrible deed was not a crime to be expiated, but a task to be assumed; what begins does not begin by itself, someone must take it upon himself. It is not the death of God that frightens us, but the greatness of the task it opens: to prove worthy of what we have done, to carry the event forward into its own light, and not let it fall back into the night where it was still only a noise. The man who has killed his gods has but one choice left: to despair of the void, or to create meaning. And no star will make that choice for him.