The Birth of Tragedy · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
4.
"In this book speaks a prodigious hope. In fine, I see no reason whatever for taking back my hope of a Dionysian future for music. Let us cast a glance a century ahead, let us suppose my assault upon two millenniums of anti-nature and man-vilification succeeds! That new party of life which will take in hand the greatest of all tasks, the upbreeding of mankind to something higher,--add thereto the relentless annihilation of all things degenerating and parasitic, will again make possible on earth that _too-much of life,_ from which there also must needs grow again the Dionysian state. I promise a _tragic_ age: the highest art in the yea-saying to life, tragedy, will be born anew, when mankind have behind them the consciousness of the hardest but most necessary wars, _without suffering therefrom._ A psychologist might still add that what I heard in my younger years in Wagnerian music had in general naught to do with Wagner; that when I described Wagnerian music I described what _I_ had heard, that I had instinctively to translate and transfigure all into the new spirit which I bore within myself...." [1] Mr. Common's translation, pp. 227-28. [2] Greek: στοά.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.