For actually means before. In the Alemannic dialect, the word Fürtuch is still the common word for "apron."* The Fürsprech speaks "forth" and is the spokesman. Yet at the same time für means "on behalf of" and "by way of justification." Finally, an advocate is one who interprets and explains what he is talking about and what he is advocating.
Zarathustra is an advocate in this threefold sense. But what does he speak forth? On whose behalf does he speak? What does he try to interpret? Is Zarathustra merely some sort of advocate for some arbitrary cause, or is he the advocate for the one thing that always and above all else speaks to human beings?
Toward the end of the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra appears a section with the heading "The Convalescent." That is Zarathustra. But what does "convalescent," der Genesende, mean? Genesen is the same word as the Greek νέομαι, νόστος, meaning to head for home. "Nostalgia" is the yearning to go home, homesickness. "The Convalescent" is one who is getting ready to turn homeward, that is, to turn toward what defines him. The convalescent is under way to himself, so that he can say of himself who he is. In the episode mentioned the convalescent says, "I, Zarathustra, the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circle...."
Zarathustra speaks on behalf of life, suffering, and the circle, and that is what he speaks forth. These three, "life, suffering, circle," belong together and are the selfsame. If we were able to think this threefold matter correctly as one and the same, we would be in a position to surmise whose advocate Zarathustra is and who it is that Zarathustra himself, as this advocate, would like to be. To be sure, we could now intervene in a heavy-handed way and explain, with indisputable correctness, that in Nietzsche's language "life" means will to power as the fundamental trait of all beings, and not merely human beings. Nietzsche himself says what "suffering" means in the following words (VI, 469): "Everything that suffers wills to live .... " "Everything" here means all things that are by way of will to power, a way that is described in the following words (XVI, 151 ): "The configurative forces collide."
* For Fürtuch (literally, "fore-cloth") Bernd Magnus has found a felicitous English parallel: the pinafore!