Lone Wong’s Reviews > The Birth of Tragedy > Status Update

For this is how religions usually die out: namely, when the mythical presuppositions of a religion are systematized as a finished sum of historical events under the strict rational eye of a dogmatic conviction, and when one begins to mount an anxious defence of their credibility, when therefore the feeling for myth dies out and is replaced by religion's claim to historical foundations.

Only insofar as the genius in the act of artistic creation fuses with that of the original artist of the world does he know something about the eternal essence of art: for in that state he miraculously resembles the uncanny image of the fairytale, which can turn its eyes inside out and contemplate itself; now he is simutaneously subject and object, simutaneously poet, actor and spectator.