[...]
What is strangest is this: afterward one has a different taste—a second taste. Out of such abysses, also out of the abyss of great suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish and sarcastic, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more tender tongue for all good things, with gayer senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred tunes more subtle than one has ever been before.
[...]
Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity. And is not this precisely what we are again coming back to, we daredevils of the spirit who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of present thought and looked around from up there—we who have looked down from there? Are we not, precisely in this respect, Greeks? Adorers of forrns, of tones, of words? And therefore—artists?"
from The Case of Wagner
"To impose upon becoming the character of being—that is the supreme will to power."
WTP 617
That is exactly what John Cage is doing, observe:
http://www.ubu.com/film/cage_masters.html
Perhaps the most striking thing about John Cage is his ability to reduce just about anyone in his vicinity to a gentle smile. For more than 50 years, the distinguished, influential and often provocative composer has been challenging audiences with his work and his ideas. All the while, his primary goal has been disarmingly simple. Mr. Cage is interested, as he puts it, in ''increasing one's enjoyment of life, to become more open.''
Mr. Cage, who was born in Los Angeles in 1912, became a student of the composer Arnold Schoenberg. The pupil soon realized he had absolutely no feeling for harmony.
Schoenberg was not encouraging: ''You'll come to a wall. You won't be able to get through.''
Mr. Cage was unfazed. ''Well, I'll bang my head against that wall,'' he said.
He then went on to defy most of the standard notions concerning serious music. He experimented with theories of chance. For Mr. Cage, one sound, or noise, was as useful as another. Is the sound of a moving truck musical, he says, then adds with characteristic impishness, ''Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?''
