O heaven over me....That is what your purity is to me now, that there is no eternal spider or spider web of reason; that you are to me a dance floor of divine accidents, that you are to me a divine table for divine dice and dice players.
-- "Before Sunrise," Thus Spake Zarathustra
One must have chaos in one's heart to give birth to a dancing star.
-- Nietzsche
The metaphysical comfort-- with which, I am suggesting even now, every true tragedy leaves us-- that life is at bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable....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 ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is 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.
-- Nietzsche,The Birth of Tragedy
And yet, and yet....Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny...is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is the fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
-- Jorge Luis Borges, "A New Refutation of Time," Labyrinths
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