Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Richard Wagner in Bayreuthcast a single glance into the Hellenic ideal, had the right to be blindto Hellenic reality. We others, on the contrary, need art preciselybecause we have evolved looking into the fa ce of reality; and we need preciselythe universal dramatist so that he may, for a few hours at least,redeem us from the fearful tension which the seeing man now feelsbetween himself and the tasks imposed upon him. With him weascend to the topmost rung of sensibility and only there do we fancywe have returned to free nature and the realm of freedom; from thisheight we behold, as though in immense air-drawn reflections, ourstruggles, victories and defeats as something sublime and significant;we have delight in the rhythm of passion and in its victim, withevery mighty step the hero takes we hear the dull echo of death andin its proximity we sense the supreme stimulus to life: thustransformed into tragic men we return to life in a strangely consoledmood, with a new feeling of security, as though out of supremedangers, excesses, ecstasies, we had found our way back to thelimited and familiar: back to where we are now abundantlybenevolent and in any event nobler than we were before; for everythingthat here appears serious and distressful, as progress towards agoal, is now, by comparison with the path we ourselves havetraversed, even if only in a dream, more like strangely isolated fragmentsof that total experience of which we have a terrified recollection;indeed, we shall run into danger, and be tempted to take lifetoo easily, precisely because we have taken art so uncommonlyseriously to allude to an expression with which Wagner characterizedthe course of his own life. For if we, who can only experiencethis art of the dithyrambic dramatist, not create it, find the dreamalmost more real than waking actuality, how must the creator of itevaluate this antithesis! There he stands in the midst of all the noisysummonses and importunities of the day, of the necessities oflife, ofsociety, of the state - as what? Perhaps as though he were the onlyone awake, the only one aware of the real and true, among confusedand tormented sleepers, among sufferers deluded by fancy; sometimesno doubt he even feels as though a victim of a protractedsleeplessness, as though condemned to pass a clear and consciouslife in the company of sleepwalkers and creatures of a spectral earnestness:so that all that seems everyday to others to him appearsuncanny, and he feels tempted to counter the impression producedby this phenomenon with exuberant mockery. But thissensation becomes a peculiar hybrid, when to the brightness ofthis exuberance there is joined a quite different impulse, the225