B40 <=> B42 [BTG I The arousing of thought, p. 41]

Please, reader, do not worry . . . I shall of course also write of the Earth, but with such an impartial attitude that this comparatively small planet itself and also everything on it shall correspond to that place which in fact it occupies and which, even according to your own sane logic arrived at, thanks of course to my guidance, it must occupy in our Great Universe.

I must, of course, also make the various what are called “heroes” of these writings of mine not such types as those which in general the writers of all ranks and epochs on Earth have drawn and exalted, that is to say, types such as any Tom, Dick, or Harry, who arise through a misunderstanding, and who fail to acquire during the process of their formation up to what is called “responsible life,” anything at all which it is proper for an arising in the image of God, that is to say a man, to have, and who progressively develop in themselves to their last breath only such various charms as for instance: “lasciviousness,” “slobberiness,” “amorousness,” “maliciousness,” “chickenheartedness,” “enviousness,” and similar vices unworthy of man.

I intend to introduce in my writings heroes of such type as everybody must, as is said, “willy-nilly” sense with his whole being as real, and about whom in every reader data must inevitably be crystallized for the notion that they are indeed “somebody” and not merely “just anybody.”

During the last weeks, while lying in bed, my body quite sick, I mentally drafted a summary of my future writings and thought out the form and sequence of their exposition, and I decided to make the chief hero of the first series of my writings . . . do you know whom? . . . the Great Beelzebub Himself – even in spite of the fact that this choice of mine might from the very beginning evoke in the mentation of most of my readers such mental associations as must engender in them all kinds of automatic contradictory impulses from the action of that totality of data infallibly formed in the psyche of people owing to all the established abnormal conditions of our external life, which data are in general crystallized in people owing to the famous what is called “religious morality” existing and rooted in their life, and in them, consequently, there must inevitably be formed data for an inexplicable hostility towards me personally.