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TRAGEDY

        
From "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music"
by Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. Walter Kaufman):
                                               
   The joyous necessity of the dream           
   experience has been embodied by          
   the Greeks in their Apollo:              
   Apollo, the god of all plastic           
   energies, is at the same time the        
   soothsaying god, He, who (as the         
   etymology of the name indicates)         
   is the "shining one," the deity          
   of light, is also ruler over the         
   beautiful illusion of the inner          
   world of fantasy.  [...]  But we         
   must also include in our image of        
   Apollo that delicate boundary            
   which the dream image must not           
   overstep lest it have a                  
   pathological effect [...]  We            
   must keep in mind the measured           
   restraint, the freedom from the          
   wilder emotions, that calm of the        
   sculptor god.  His eye must be           
   "sunlike," as befits his origin;         
   even when it is angry and                
   distempered it is still hallowed         
   by beautiful illusion [...]              
                                            
   [...]Schopenhauer has depicted           
   for us the tremendous _terror_           
   which seizes man when he is              
   suddenly dumbfounded by the              
   cognitive form of phenomena              
   because the principle of                 
   sufficient reason, in some one of        
   its manifestations, seems to             
   suffer an exception.  If we add          
   to this terror the blissful              
   ecstasy that wells from the              
   innermost depths of man, indeed          
   of nature, at this collapse of           
   the _principium individuationis_,        
   we steal a glimpse into the              
   nature of the _Dionysian_, which         
   is brought home to us most               
   intimately by the analogy of                  Note that this is an
   intoxication.                                 "analogy": the point then
                                                 is not to be drunk all 
   Even under the influence of the               the time, but to be drunk
   narcotic draught, of which songs              without drinking.
   of all primitive men and peoples                               
   speak, or with the potent coming                               DRUGS (?)
   of spring that penetrates all            
   nature with joy, these Dionysian         
   emotions awake, and as they grow         
   in intensity everything                  
   subjective vanishes into complete        
   self-forgetfulness.  In the              
   German Middle Ages, too, singing         
   and dancing crowds, ever                 
   increasing in number, whirled            
   themselves from place to place           
   under this same Dionysian                
   impulse. [...] There are some            
   who, from obtuseness or lack of          
   experience, turn away from such          
   phenomena as from                        
   "folk-diseases," with contempt of        
   pity born of consciousness of             
   their own "healthy-mindedness."           
   But of course such poor wretches          
   have no idea how corpselike and           
   ghostly their so-called                   
   "healthy-mindedness" looks when           
   the glowing life of the Dionysian         
   revelers roars past them.                 
                                             
                                             
                                             
                                             
((If this thing weren't overburdened with quotations already, 
I'd insert a section called COMEDY with quotes from self-proclaimed
Apollonian, Any Rand.  Equal time, and all.))      
                                                   
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