Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound: this is my ...proposition. That "savage animal" has not really been "mortified"; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become--divine. What constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty; what seems agreeable in so-called tragic pity, and at bottom in everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate shudders of metaphysics, receives its sweetness solely from the admixture of cruelty. What the Roman in the arena, the Christian in the ecstasies of the cross, the Spaniard at an auto-da-fe or bullfight, the Japanese of today when he flocks to tragedies, the laborer in a Parisian suburb who feels a nostalgia for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne who "submits to" Tristan and Isolde, her will suspended--what all of them enjoy and seek to drink in with mysterious ardor are the spicy potions of the great Circe, "cruelty."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And one has eaten and one walks, past the magazines with nudes... and the posters for bullfight and the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, which they'll soon tear down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was so sick and faint, so overcome at the brutality of this fiendish sport, that I hardly heard the shouts of "Bravo! bravo!" an...d the fanfaronade of trumpets.... I do not know which astonished me the most, the strikingly curious, brilliant coup d'oeil, the dexterity of the men, the intrepidity of the animals, the miserable unfair play, or the pleasure of the spectators.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »