The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche (1872)

When King Midas at last cornered the satyr Silenus and demanded to know what is best for man, the wise companion of Dionysus laughed and said: best never to have been born, and next best to die soon. This is the abyss Nietzsche believed the Greeks stared straight into, and his wonder is that they answered it not with despair but with tragedy, the most life-affirming art ever made. He finds two gods at its root. Apollo casts the beautiful, bounded dream-image over the horror; Dionysus, god of music and intoxication, dissolves the trembling self back into the whole; and their union on a stage lets a whole people look at suffering and still say yes. From this comes the vertiginous claim at its heart, that only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world eternally justified. A young classicist wrote it, his own discipline recoiled, and everything Nietzsche would become is already dancing here.