Mount of Olives is the sunny corner where Zarathustra escapes the cold without denying its presence. Set against winter’s chill and the noise of inhabited streets, it becomes a place of warmth, solitude, and irreverent song: a refuge from pity, but not a retreat from the hard conditions that make the refuge meaningful.

Setting and Retreat

Winter sits in Zarathustra’s house as an ill guest, leaving his hands blue from its handshake. He honours this stern visitor, yet gladly leaves it sitting alone and runs away. Mount of Olives is where he runs: a sunny corner reached with warm feet and warm thoughts, in a place where the wind is still. The contrast makes the mountain less an escape from winter than a chosen counterpoint to it—a pocket of warmth within the season’s severity.

Winter’s Work

Zarathustra’s relation to the cold is deliberately double. Winter is unwelcome, but he remains fond of the guest because its presence drives away flies and silences small household noises. Its severity also empties the streets; at night, the moonlight itself seems afraid there. The stillness at Mount of Olives is therefore linked to winter’s hard effects: the season clears away distractions even as Zarathustra seeks shelter from its chill.

Song Against Pity

When the surrounding people chatter and sigh in the cold, they pity Zarathustra’s chilblains and imagine that he will freeze on the ice of knowledge. He answers not by asking for sympathy but by running over Mount of Olives, singing and mocking pity in its sunny corner. The location thus gives physical form to his refusal of their response: he keeps moving, warm-footed, while their concern takes the form of lament. His song does not erase winter; it turns the place opened by winter’s solitude into a setting for independence and defiant amusement.