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When Northern Europe, whether it hates Nietzsche or not, is crying out for the Dionysic ecstasy, practising on itself the Dionysic ecstasy, Southern Europe is breaking free from Dionysus, from the triumphal affirmation of life over death, immortality through procreation. I could see these sons of Italy would never go back. Men like Paolo and Il Duro broke away only to return.
It is really from him that Nietzsche learnt that wanton Dionysic talisman which opens the door to such singular spiritual orgies. Nothing is more characteristic of Dostoievsky's method than his perpetual insistence upon the mania which certain curious human types display for "making fools of themselves." The more sacred aspects of this deliberate self-humiliation require no comment.
Man knows satisfaction when he surpasses all conditions and becomes, to himself, consummate in the Infinite, when he reaches a state of infinity. In the supreme ecstasy of the flesh, the Dionysic ecstasy, he reaches this state. But how does it come to pass in Christ? It is not the mystic ecstasy.
But I hate ecstasy, Dionysic or any other. It's like going round in a squirrel cage. I want you not to care about yourself, just to be there and not to care about yourself, not to insist be glad and sure and indifferent. 'Who insists? she mocked. 'Who is it that keeps on insisting? It isn't ME! There was a weary, mocking bitterness in her voice. He was silent for some time. 'I know, he said.
'I can let myself go, easily enough. It is you who can't let yourself go, it is you who hang on to yourself as if it were your only treasure. YOU YOU are the Sunday school teacher YOU you preacher. The amount of truth that was in this made him stiff and unheeding of her. 'I don't mean let yourself go in the Dionysic ecstatic way, he said. 'I know you can do that.
His very mania for tragedy, his Dionysic embracing of it, precludes any premature despair. Perhaps a profound deepening of one's sense of the mysterious perversity of all human fate is the thing that lingers, a perversity which is itself a kind of redemption, for it implies arbitrariness and waywardness, and these things mean power and pleasure, even in the midst of suffering.
I wish I could repeat to you all the Dionysic verse of this old poet from Venosa, whose subjects and motives, even though expressed in the choicest forms, may seem common and conventional in our time and to us, among whom for centuries the custom of drinking wine daily with meals has been a general habit.
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