Old and Young Women (Nietzsche's Zarathustra)

Excerpt from Michael Scott interpretation "Thus spoke Zarathustra".
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Thus spake Zarathustra, A book for all and none, by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Thomas Common
Courtesy of the University of Adelaide Library Electronic Texts Collection
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Thus, the philosopher abhors marriage as well as what might persuade him into it-marriage is a barrier and a disaster along his route to the optimal. What great philosopher up to now has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Schopenhauer-none of these got married. What's more, we cannot even imagine them married. A married philosopher belongs in a comedy, that's my principle. And Socrates, that exception, the malicious Socrates, it appears, ironically got married specifically to demonstrate this very principle. Every philosopher would speak as once Buddha spoke when someone told him of the birth of a son, "Rahula has been born to me. A shackle has been forged for me." (Rahula here means "a little demon"). To every "free spirit" there must come a reflective hour, provided that previously he has had one without thought, of the sort that once came to this same Buddha-"Life in a house," he thought to himself, "is narrow and confined, a polluted place. Freedom consists of abandoning the house"; "because he thought this way, he left the house." The ascetic ideal indicates so many bridges to independence that a philosopher cannot, without an inner rejoicing and applause, listen to the history of all those decisive people who one day said "No" to all lack of freedom and went off to some desert or other, even assuming that such people were merely strong donkeys and entirely opposite to a powerful spirit. So what, then, does the ascetic ideal mean as far as a philosopher is concerned? My answer is-you will have guessed it long ago-the philosopher smiles when he sees in it an optimal set of conditions for the loftiest and boldest spirituality-in so doing, he does not deny "existence"; rather that's how he affirms his existence and only his existence and does this perhaps to such a degree that he is not far from the wicked desire pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus, fiam! [let the world perish, let philosophy exist, let the philosopher exist, let me exist!] .
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals