What does Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Papen have in common you ask? A morbid longing for the picturesque, perhaps
An essay analyzing The Secret History through Nietzsche's theories of the Apolline and the Dionysiac
"Here, in this supreme menace to the will, there approaches a redeeming, healing enchantress β art. She alone can turn these thoughts of repulsion at the horror and absurdity of existence into ideas compatible with life β Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy"
If you are reading this essay because, like me, you feel something from casual interest to ravishing passion for literature β or even for art in general β then you, me, Nietzsche, and the Classics students of Hampden College perhaps share, in some level, a morbid longing for the picturesque. In this beautiful sentence I chose as epigraph, Nietzsche concludes a lengthy argument in The Birth of Tragedy stating that the only thing between humans and utter despair is art. Depending on the personal level of existential dread, then, it is possible to measure oneβs regard for artistic subjects. Unfortunately, I consider myself quite desperate, but not so much as to make me a poet. Thank goodness.Β Β
People like Goethe, Keats, Baudelaire, etc. are in the highest degree of the art x despair scale, and we remember them because they βturned these thoughts of repulsionβ into art, that is, βideas compatible with lifeβ. But they are the few who can. The rest get lost in delusions of grandeur or abjection, consumed by their obsessions. And that is the denouement of the main characters in Donna Tartt's The Secret History.
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