Apolline Repression and Dionysiac Excess: uncovering 'The Secret History' by Donna Tartt

What does Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Papen have in common you ask? A morbid longing for the picturesque, perhaps

Here, in this supreme menace to the will, there approaches a redeeming, healing enchantress – art. She alone can turn these thoughts of repulsion at the horror and absurdity of existence into ideas compatible with life — 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 – or even for art in general – 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 one’s regard for artistic subjects. Unfortunately, I consider myself quite desperate, but not so much as to make me a poet. Thank goodness.  

People like Goethe, Keats, Baudelaire, etc. are in the highest degree of the art x despair scale, and we remember them because they “turned these thoughts of repulsion” into art, that is, “ideas compatible with life”. 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.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the novel as the pinnacle of the Dark Academia aesthetic, and although fairly accurate, it is so much more than the materialisation of a trend. The author, besides being a tremendous writer, possesses an interesting range of knowledge in the humanities, and she transmits her background subtly, tightly knitting the information into the novel fabric – at first glance, you can’t see the stitches of her references, but it’s there. 

The epigraph represents a central theme in both Nietzsche’s and Tartt’s works. Besides measuring despair, it establishes art as the only thing capable of giving existence meaning. It’s there in The Secret History but also in The Goldfinch (another Tartt novel) when Theo Decker says ‘It is a glory and a privilege to love what death doesn’t touch’, in other words, when we love a piece of art, part of us is immortalised in the work. We may die but art lingers eternally, creating a brief respite from death in our appreciation. That’s also how Nietzsche felt in his awe of Classical culture. 

Baalbec: Ruins of the Temple of Bacchus — David Roberts, 1840

I. “I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive”

I believe there are two ways you can read The Secret History. You can either appreciate it as an atmospheric, dark academia, backwards murder-mystery, or, you can take it as a character puzzle and a charade of symbolisms – the two are equally amusing. I read it twice and employed both techniques, which gave me some insights. There is a question underneath the narrative: ‘Who would you be if you could follow all your impulses? And are these impulses your truest self?’. This is a major aspect of the Dionysiac Bacchanal in Euripides’ Bacchae – a complete release of your individuality to become ‘one’ with the ‘whole’ (could be nature, community, the universe, you name it) in order to achieve your purest version.  

This identity question is one I usually ponder over and over in my head, and I adore books that explore this conflict of impulses, such as The Picture of Dorian Grey and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The maxim ‘Know Thyself’ is the basis for all of these tragedies, and is a concept incredibly tricky: it’s not just knowing if you are introverted or extroverted, if you are romantic or cynical; it is a lingering practice which puts us constantly in check, wondering ‘Is this actually me or am I playing the part of someone I should be? Is there any difference?’. 

As far as my knowledge goes, I don’t have an answer for it (yet), and this essay isn’t an attempt at enlightenment, rather, it is a pure analysis of great literature for the hell of it. If we do find something at the end, so much the better. 

Now, there is something peculiar about the characters which attracted me from the beginning: their intensity. Every one of them – Richard, Henry, Camilla, Charles, Francis and Bunny – is troubled by some kind of mental exaggeration, be it an excessive obsession, an abuse of alcohol or cigarettes, a tendency to catastrophise, alarming sensibilities, or heavy self-repression. They are always on the edge of a metaphorical precipice. 

The more someone represses something, the bigger that something becomes. I consider Richard and Henry to be the most repressed characters but in very different ways. As an unreliable narrator, Richard is simultaneously lying to the characters and the reader (and even to himself) – we are only able to catch him because sometimes his repressive shell cracks, some interior glimpses appear, and what we see is desperation. Richard is always desperate: to be liked, to be accepted, to belong, to know, to be someone else. 

Whereas Henry's submerged façade is of a dangerous kind: he hides a violence within himself, a cruelty, frightening us and Richard with his obstinacy. Always the most composed character, it is uncanny to see how far he can go to ensure his will: escaping to Argentina, travelling to Italy with Bunny, the Bacchanal, the murder, the final scene at the Hotel. Everything he does is driven by this internal force he possesses, a frighteningly determined force, completely blind to anything that escapes its target. Henry suffers from a sick delusion of grandeur. Neither we nor Richard will ever understand the extent of what he harboured inside. 

Tartt’s genius technique gives us just the necessary amount of characterisation, without ever over-explaining anything. When the reader bids farewell to Richard, questions remain, we are left wondering about what truly happened. Thus, her writing’s evocative power ensures that the book lingers in our minds.

The story as a whole is immersed in a fog of delusion, just like the ones Dionysus is known to create. Although a deceiver, the god is capable of exposing one’s true colours – he is the sombre excess of nature. On the other hand, civilised oppression is connected with Apollo, a representative of harmony in opposition to Dionysus. Both concepts are extensively described in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, and we need to master them to understand my take on The Secret History.

Bacchus — Caravaggio, c. 1596

II. The Need for Tragedy

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. - E.M. Forster

Nietzsche begins The Birth of Tragedy by distinguishing the Apolline and the Dionysiac, the first associated with a harmonic illusion and the second with an intoxication that stupefies the senses. With Dionysiac intoxication, man loses control of himself in ecstasy and forsakes his individual subjectivity, becoming one with nature through the communion born of music and dance. This state of mind is what Plato called ‘Telestic’ or ‘ritual madness’, whose patron is Dionysus.

The text also counterpoints the Greek religion with the Christian one (although Nietzsche doesn’t explicitly mention ‘Christians’ in the book), highlighting the Greeks' ‘fantastic exuberance’ of life versus Christian ‘asceticism’. One of the most intriguing perspectives is Nietzsche's explanation for the creation of the Gods via Greek imagery: it was a matter of survival, as it was necessary to put something like the Olympus between humans and the horrors of the forces of nature (the Titans). One could say this is the premise of every religion, after all, most religions persist because we need to put something between us and the only element of nature yet unexplained: death.

Much like we need reality in order to dream, and suffering to conceive pleasure, the Apollonian and the Dionysian cannot exist without each other. According to Nietzsche, Apollo represents a moderate and harmonious beauty. For an individual to have moderation, he needs self-knowledge – he needs to know his limits: ‘Know Thyself’ and ‘Nothing to Excess’ are maxims originating from this mostly aesthetic beauty. ‘Hubris’ and exaggeration on the other hand are considered barbaric. Therefore, Apollo would be the civility and Dionysus the titanic barbarity of uncontrolled passions, instincts and impulses.

Walter Pater, in his Greek Studies, defined Dionysus in a more poetic and positive light:

‘he is the inherent cause of music and poetry; he inspires; he explains the phenomena of enthusiasm, as distinguished by Plato in the Phaedrus, the secrets of possession by a higher and more energetic spirit than one's own, the gift of self-revelation, of passing out of oneself through words, tones, gestures’. (PATER, 1894)

Thus knowing what is Apollonian and Dionysian, what would then be the tragedy and how does the birth addressed in the title occur? According to Nietzsche, the birth of tragedy is due to the union between these two opposing forces: the Apollonian gives a structure of beauty to the chaotic feelings of the Dionysian. In practice, this union happened when the Greeks joined lyric poetry with instrumental music and inserted this element into the theatre, thus creating the chorus.

When he wrote this book, Nietzsche was only a 28-year-old professor of Greek Language and Literature, hence his fresh passionate interest in the subject and his somewhat unorthodox opinions. For instance, he curiously detested Euripides and placed him as one of the culprits for the death of tragedy, since the Dramatist was an intellectual companion of the philosophers, mainly Socrates and Plato. Together they contributed to the destruction of the irrational in Homeric poetry by proposing an ‘excess’ of rationality, optimistically thinking everything can be known through logic, surpassing the Olympian mysticism as well as the forces of nature: aesthetic Socratism is the principle behind its death.

To Nietzsche, Socrates could not understand tragedy because his ‘eye had never glowed with the sweet madness of artistic inspiration’ (p. 136). Socratic philosophy establishes that if wisdom is Virtue, all ‘sins’ are fruits of ignorance – this idea disregards the transcendental: the obscurity deriving from the state of negation of the self needs to be clarified, nothing can remain unexplained, not even nature, previously justified by the moods of the gods. In short, the death of tragedy occurred because, by discarding the transcendental and the unknowable of the divine, the Greeks lost their fear of the irrational and sought to explain it.

Socrates represents the turning point in Western thought, promoting a thirst for knowledge previously unimaginable, which in today’s society I would say is insatiable. However, there are limits to what logic can explain, especially concerning Being – when one realises this, one enters into existential despair, thus arising the need for art/tragedy as a filler for human emptiness.

III. Apolline Repression and Dionysiac Excess

From what Nietzsche argued, I see the Apollonian as artificial and the Dionysian natural: the Apollonian representation is the negation of an animalistic self, preceding civilisation, preceding even the construction of the self, as the Dionysian is a state of communion where the personality merges with the whole of the cosmos. The human, therefore, is the balance of those forces, but usually, it seems as if the Apollonian precedes and suffocates the Dionysian. 

In a Christian society, there is no space for such a thing as a Bacchanal, and any kind of expression which embraces animalistic extravagance is considered amoral and barbaric. Yet, Nietzsche would argue all human beings have the Dionysian side and it needs to be released in a ‘healthy’ manner, and not completely erased from our personalities. Then comes the Apolline repression, which is directly proportional to the greatness of the animalistic desire. Knowing oneself means knowing the extent of one’s desire. 

Thus we enter Tarttian territories. The danger of attaining this knowledge to moderate oneself lies in getting in touch with the Dionysian side: the feral facet constantly repressed. In the essay The Uncanny, Freud identifies the dread of not recognising oneself as one of the worst fears of the individual, for there is nothing more uncanny than facing our alienated and (un)consciously repressed monstrous self, which we simultaneously are and are not. This duality is what Nietzsche asserts as the ‘artificially restrained’ versus the ‘excess of nature’:

‘Life deserves to be lived, says art, the most beautiful seductress; life deserves to be known, says science. From this contrast comes the internal contradiction’. (On Homer and Classical Philology)

The dichotomy between ‘to live’ and ‘to know’ is one of the main points of Nietzsche's critique of the incessant and optimistic quest for knowledge, which despises the mysticism of inexplicable things as ‘barbaric’.

Returning to The Secret History, I’d like to call your attention to the enigmatic Henry Winter. As I said before, he is uncanny because his outside never matches his inside: there’s always dissonance with the way he speaks and carries himself, with what he seems and does. 

One could argue that all of them are repressed and it would be correct, but Henry is the one who always takes everything a little too far, a little too literal – he is the Dionysiac excess waiting to burst. The nearest thing to a plot twist concerns Henry, specifically his true desires and designs. We close the book feeling we never actually knew who he was. The Bacchanal was his idea, and I believe the seed was planted during one of the most memorable scenes (and a personal favourite) through a speech uttered by Professor Julian. To me, it is the soul of the novel and the essence of what Nietzsche argued:

‘It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, ‘more like deer than human being.’ To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.’ (p. 45)

It perfectly reflects how repression is a powerful force in the life of the characters, and how they long for a primordial connection apparently lost in modern times. They thought (and so did Nietzsche) the Greeks had the secret of this daunting freedom, and decided to reclaim their animalistic self through a Bacchanal. 

La danse des bacchantes — Charles Gleyre, 1849

IV. The Amusement of the Gods

‘The Greeks are still very much with us. Even that strange ritual of sacrifice… which seemed the epitome of  ‘otherness’, so alien to our thought and feeling, has its resonances in our world’  — Bernard Knox, The oldest dead white European Males

Since the foundation of Greek civilisation, the mystical elements of divine mystery were common in the life of the polis. One of the great pieces of evidence of this supernatural connection is the constant presence of prophets and oracles in Greek plays. However, Knox emphasises how in the last half of the 5th century BC, when the great playwrights were working, religious traditions were losing strength and, consequently, the power of prophecy was declining. 

Knox sees the events of this period as an intellectual revolution, and young intellectuals came to view prophecies and oracles with scepticism: when Protagoras proclaimed man as the measure of all things, he subjugated to man not only nature but the gods and religion itself as well. In Knox's words:

‘For if the case for divine foreknowledge could be successfully demolished, the whole traditional religious edifice went down with it. If the gods did not know the future, they did not know any more than man’ (KNOX, p. 137)

Nietzsche identifies the end of the Dionysian (in the sense of divine mystery), and therefore the death of tragedy, in the way Knox observes the overcoming of prophecy and its impacts on society, specifically on Greek theatre. Perhaps most important for our text and for understanding Nietzsche's and Tartt's artistic argument is this brilliant phrase from Knox:

‘But it is the function of great art to purge and give meaning to human suffering, and so we expect that if the hero is indeed crushed in Act II there will be some reason for it, and not just some reason but a good one, one which makes sense in terms of the hero’s personality and action. In fact, we expect to be shown that he is in some way responsible for what happens to him’. (KNOX, p. 138)

Human suffering, in the pre-philosophical period, was nothing but the amusement of the gods, and the invention of myths, plays, poems, was the way people found to make sense of it. Art, as Nietzsche said in The Birth of Tragedy, transforms the horror of existence into the sublime. Ultimately, this is what the Hampden group seeks to achieve with the bacchanal. If we consider Richard as the hero of the novel, we can see he fulfils Knox's premise, for in the end, we realise he, through his bad choices driven by obsession, is solely responsible for what happens to himself.

V. Tragedy and Duality – Euripides’ Play

Bacchae is a play which permeates Tartt’s novel, providing ‘inspiration’ for the characters. In it, knowledge and tradition are juxtaposed, in other words, rationality and mysticism. To this day there is debate about how barbaric the bacchantes' rituals actually were. The accounts in the legendary odes describe the altered state of consciousness of sublime ecstasy – in Greek ekstasis means 'to stand outside of or transcend [oneself]'. It is not relevant here to debate Bacchae's fidelity to the actual rituals, it is enough to know that in the play violence and supernaturalism are crucial elements, and to recognise the influence the play has had on the cultural imagination. 

At one point, Pentheus (a main character in Bacchae) enters a Dionysian trance - he can no longer distinguish between reality and delirium: he sees two suns, two Thebes, and Dionysus as a bull. His state of consciousness alludes to Henry’s description of the bacchanal:

Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white [...] Vines grew from the ground so fast they twined up the trees like snakes; seasons passing in the wink of an eye [...] Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no ‘I’. (TSH p. 186)

But above all, this state of imposed illusion, of a coercive fog, can be applied as a metaphor for the whole book: our narrator, being unreliable, deludes the reader as he deludes himself, and the ecstatic glow of Hampden and his Greek sect begins to fade in the first act of brutality and disappears altogether when Richard overcomes his denial (a denial similar to Pentheus') and understands who those people really are. The Dionysian use illusion to reveal the truth. Professor Edith Hall says about Dionysus: 

If the divine personality of Dionysius can be reduced to any one principle, it is the demonstration that conventional logic is an inadequate tool with which to apprehend the universe as a whole. Dionysius confounds reason, defies categorization, dissolves polarities, and inverts hierarchies. (Bacchae and other plays - Oxford)

In the Bacchae, Pentheus is tricked by Dionysus into disguising himself as a maenad so he could spy on the women’s Dionysiac ritual. This course of action, motivated by morbid curiosity and a certain resentment, resembles Richard's attitude towards the group: he too is an impostor, an outsider who poses as a person of wealthy origin and desperately tries to mask his lack of ‘refinement’. He wants to discover the secret of the group's mystical element, wishing to be included in its activities, so that perhaps he too can become ‘mystic’. Pentheus' discovery of the tragic truth (catharsis, one might call it) was his undoing – this is the premise of most Greek tragedies, above all Oedipus Rex – and the same happened in Richard's life.

Bacchante Teasing a Goat — William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1862

VI. Dionysiac Delusions of Grandeur: the otherness of the group

Up until now, I have said that according to Nietzsche, art is what alleviates human suffering and gives meaning to existence. However, the disregard for tradition of individuals who optimistically believe everything can be explained by logic (or science) destroyed the mystery of the gods, clouded its allure, and murdered Greek tragedy. Also, this obsession with truth is paradoxically connected with delusions of grandeur of presumptuous people – such an attitude is found among the main characters of the novel (and among young Nietzsche’s works too). 

In The Philosophy and Literature of Existentialism, Wesley Barnes introduced a paradox concerning the relationship between man and gods which gives birth to the tragedy: the greater the god is in the human conception the greater man sees himself – he’s a reflection of the divine power who created him. These delusions of grandeur give such a man the idea of being above his society – in his individualism he claims divinity, he escapes the collective by setting himself apart.

This separation comes from the tragic hero’s idea that he knows best or is entitled to the same knowledge as the gods – it’s rationalist arrogance. It’s exactly what Oedipus does by ignoring the advice of Teiresias as he relentlessly pursues knowledge about himself and, less epically, it is what Pentheus does by deliberately forbidding the cult of Dionysus, even though the citizens of Thebes embraced the god and the same Teiresias begged him to be wise (a heavy theme in Bacchae) and to stop persecuting Dionysius and the devotees.

The quest for wisdom is one Nietzsche himself was engaged in. Donna Tartt mentions the philosopher’s Untimely Meditations in the novel’s epigraph, along with a passage from Plato's Republic. Following the writing of The Birth of Tragedy and On Homer and Classical Philology, the Meditations have the same intention and tone of youthful ingenuity and dramatic consternation about the contemporary condition of European, especially German, culture. 

In this collection of essays, the most relevant for my interpretation of The Secret History is On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, where Nietzsche displays a ghastly amount of elitism in relation to ‘the masses’ which according to him are nothing but ‘blurred copies of great men’. The philosopher’s delirium of grandeur is similar to the group's self-perception against the rest of Hampden College (dare I say the world) – some are more hypocritical than others (Henry being the most open about it, describing the murder of the farmer as ‘a minor incident, really’) but all of them think they are intellectually and morally above everyone else, and this aura of self-aggrandising is partly what attracts Richard because he wants to be part of this ‘importance’. He already sees himself apart, but he needs external validation. 

The philosopher tries to convince the reader of the equivocation of an exaggerated ‘cultivation of history'. Such ‘meditation’ would be ‘untimely' because, at the time he wrote this, the historicist perspective was on the rise. Nietzsche has some pride in being ‘untimely’, and he associates this to his being ‘a pupil of [Hellenic] times’ (p. 60):

I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely – that is to say, acting counter our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come (p. 60)

Again, this idea of being ‘out of time’ and ‘out of place’ is part of the group’s attitude which hinders their ability to identify with other people, making them isolated and insensitive, and therefore enabling them to commit murder as well as lesser cruelties – like in Nietzsche’s argument, they do not see themselves in ‘the masses’; this presumptuous ‘otherness’ is the rationale behind their actions. Everything about them is anachronistic: from Henry being unaware of the moon landing, their clothes and stationery supplies, to the twins' incest resembling a Sophocleain tragedy. This makes them impossible to relate to, while also increasing their allure.

VII. The Impossibility of the Irrational

Let's take a look at this quote by Walter Pater in his Greek Studies: 

The subject of the Bacchanals of Euripides is the infatuated opposition of Pentheus, king of Thebes, to Dionysus and his religion; [...]  Pentheus, the man of grief, being torn to pieces [...]  in the judicial madness sent upon her by the god. In this play, Euripides has only taken one of many versions of the same story, in all of which Dionysus is victorious (PATER, 1894)

Considering all Dionysus represents along with the ending of Tartt's novel, I believe the god has also won in The Secret History. In many ways, I see Richard as a kind of Pentheus – the self-righteous outsider desperately trying to catch a glimpse of the divine, defeated by the forces he tries to be part of. Symbolically, Richard was also torn apart by maenads – the people who played a part in his self-destruction were the ones who performed the bacchanal. 

Like Pentheus, he is deluded first by his own stubbornness and self-deception, and afterwards by Dionysiac powers. We cannot rely on his testimony about the events, as much as we can’t rely on Pentheus' view of the Bacchae. Ultimately, just as Pentheus was blind to Dionysus being in front of him, so was Richard towards the true nature of the people he once idolised. Henry is the greatest Dionysiac force in the novel because he is the greatest mystery – we only see short displays of the violence he is repressing and the manipulation he exerts on others. And of course, like the objects of their obsession, the story of the Classics group ends in tragedy. 

On the subject of self-deception, I kept thinking of a line from Henry. He told Richard the bacchanal worked, but to my understanding, it did not, not in its truest sense. When questioned by Richard on why he decided to do a bacchanal, Henry simply says he wanted ‘to escape the cognitive model of experience, to transcend the accident of one’s moment of being. [...] to lose one’s self, to lose it utterly’ (p. 182). Quite a rationalist approach to the ritual, as there is no evidence that the Greeks performed the bacchanals with the sole intention to ‘escape cognitive experience’.

In fact, this effect was always described as a consequence of the devotional deed. As much as the group tries, they can never escape their Apolline restraints, indeed I think no modern man can. They forget bacchanals are religious doings, and ignore the tacit cosmological understandings in Greek society which are inconceivable to anyone outside of that context. Henry said he believed, but his justification for the act betrays him. His desire for Dionysus' intoxicated blessing is like wanting to take holy communion on a random Sunday without ever going to church and expecting Jesus’ grace anyways.

The Dionysiac is, as Nietzsche explained, a way of life. It’s a constant practice and mindset, it is endless devotion, and it requires a social and natural environment that we will never have again.  The Olympian gods are dead, and a random ritual is not enough to resurrect them, because like every other religion, it needs a living community. Henry failed the ritual because – as much as he deludes himself – he and the rest of the group cannot understand this sort of mystical faith, so deeply rooted in nature. As Pater said:

[...] the religion of Dionysus was, for those who lived in it, a complete religion, a complete sacred representation and interpretation of the whole of life [...] Home-spun dream of simple people, and like them in the uneventful tenour of [Dionysus] existence, he has almost no story; he is but a presence; the spiritual form of Arcadia, and the ways of human life there; the reflection, in sacred image or ideal, of its flocks, and orchards, and wild honey; the dangers of its hunters; its weariness in noonday heat; its children, agile as the goats they tend, who run, in their picturesque rags, across the solitary wanderer's path, to startle him, in the unfamiliar upper places; (PATER, 1894)

The god is a reflection of the people who created him, and the kids at Hampden could never reflect him in the same way. The Dionysiac is the kind of Beauty that arouses Terror, but one can only reach this disturbing blessing by letting go of all rational and civilising ties. As I said earlier, it is impossible for modern man to reach the mystical state of irrationality. 

In The Philosophy and Literature of Existentialism, Barnes explains how, in modern times, especially from the 19th century onwards, ‘Religion has abandoned the supernatural in favour of the “super-ethical natural”’, and as we saw, Nietzsche described the phenomena along the same lines. 

It seems that, regardless of where and when, western society is stuck in a perpetual cycle switching from moments of extreme mystical subjectivism to a period of great asceticism or rationalism. Of course, this is a great simplification of history but, broadly speaking from a Eurocentric perspective, we see it in the change in Greek society mentioned by Nietzsche, in the rise of Humanism as a response to Mediaeval culture, in the Modernist reaction to the Victorian tradition, and so on. 

I don’t know where we are headed, but I do know that we are in a period of insufferable rationalism, an epoch that generally lacks sensibility. Maybe I’m mistaken but it’s hard to be optimistic after taking a good look around. I understand the characters' desires as I also understand Nietzsche’s approach, but unlike them, I don’t think there is an easy way through rituals or manifestos. Maybe we have grown too sceptical to be religious, and if that is true, we have to find a new way to fulfil our lives with the sublime again.

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References:

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Birth of Tragedy”

——. “Untimely Meditations”

——. “Anti-Education: On the Future of Educational Institutions”

——. “On Homer and Classical Philology”

——. “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks”

Knox, Bernard and Fagles, Robert. “Three Theban Plays” by Sophocles

Knox, Bernard. “The Greeks and the Irrational”

Hall, Edith. “Bacchae and Other Plays” by Euripides

Pater, Walter. “Greek Studies”