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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.



               ((Some time I should insert a section
               called COMEDY with quotes from              COMEDY
               self-proclaimed Apollonian, Ayn Rand.
               Equal time, and all.))


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