God pwns

     The psychology of the orgiastic as an overflowing feeling of life and stregnth, where even pain still has the effect of a stimulus, gave me the key to the concept of the tragic feeling, which had been mis-understood both by Aristotle and, quite especially, by our modern pessimists. Tragedy is so far from proving anything about the pessimisim of the Hellenes, is Shopenhauer’s sense, that is may, on the contrary, be considered its decisive repudiation and counter-instance. Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems, the will to life rejoicing over its inexhaustibility even in the very sacrifice of its highest types — that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to be liberated from terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself from a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge — Aristotle understood it that way — but in order to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity — that joy which included even joy in destroying. 

-Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols,  What I owe the Ancients: 5

     In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is so out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no — true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.

     Now no comfort avails any more; longing transcends a world after death, even the gods; existence is negated along with its glittering reflection in the gods or in an immortal beyond. Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence; now he understands what is symbolic in Ophelia’s fate; now he understands the wisdom of the sylvan god, Silenus: he is nauseated.

     Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity. The satyr chorus of the dithyramb is the saving deed of Greek art; faced with the intermediary world of these Dionysian companions, the feelings described here exhausted themselves.

-Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 7:11-13

     Without music, life would be an error.  

-Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols,  Maxims and Arrows: 33