Chorus: Let not thy love to man oerleap the bounds — Escapism

"Men cannot, for Nietzche, escape time. It is the effort to remove oneself from history which Nietzche sees at the root of the various attempts at redemption: Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer, along with the Christians before them and science after, all maintain the existence of a world of transcendental concept(s) (be this God, theoretical reason, the Geist, the laws of physics), as the source for a solution to the problems of earthly being. "Redemption" consists of escaping from this world to that one, or, conversely, having that world take this one over. Given, however, Nietzches general hostility to such notions of transcendence and two-worldliness, it is unlikely that he would assert the possibility or desirability of escaping the reality of time."

"It is Schopenhauers argument in his essay "On Suicide," that the possibility of easy and painless self-destruction is the only thing that constantly and considerably ameliorates the horror of human life. Suicide is a means of escape from the world and its tortures—and therefore it is good. It is an ever-present refuge for the weak, the weary and the hopeless. It is, in Plinys phrase, the greatest of all blessings which Nature gives to man," and one which even God himself lacks, for "he could not compass his own death, if he willed to die." In all of this exaltation of surrender, of course, there is nothing whatever in common with the dionysian philosophy of defiance. Nietzches teaching is all in the other direction. He urges, not surrender, but battle; not flight, but war to the end. His curse falls upon those "preachers of death" who counsel "an abandonment of life"—whether this abandonment be partial, as in asceticism, or actual, as in suicide. And yet Zarathustra sings the song of "free death" and says that the higher man must learn to die "at the right time." .. Schopenhauer regards suicide as a means of escape, Neitzche sees it as a means of good riddance. It is time to die, says Zarathustra, when the purpose of life ceases to be attainable..."

"It is all escapism to feel dependent. By such an attitude you just lame yourself... The right way is your own way, and you should make yourself go on that way."

"The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived. What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: "They pray not only for their daily bread, but also for their daily illusion."

"All literature, but especially literature of the weird and the fantastic, is a cave where both readers and writers hide from life. (Which is exactly why so many parents and teachers, spotting a teenager with a collection of stories by Lovecraft, Bloch, or Clark Ashton Smith, are apt to cry, “Why are you reading that useless junk?”) It is in just such caves—such places of refuge—that we lick our wounds and prepare for the next battle out in the real world."

"Shakespeares final Exeunts order us out of the theater because the unfinished business they leave us with cannot be transacted there. ... What stage death offers the hero is an escape from this verbal dying into the rest that is silence. ...a critique of this commitment to stageable closure as an escape from meaning. ... This critique speaks to the ethical limits of such notions as Aristotles circumscribed concept of courage, the courage that thinks to prove itself by facing death in battle as "the most terrible thing of all." ...Aristotle limits the range of the term according to the doctrine of the mean: "to seek death in order to escape from poverty, or the pangs of love, or from pain or sorrow, is not the act of a courageous man, but rather of a coward; for it is weakness to fly from troubles, and the suicide does not endure death because it is noble to do so, but to escape evil." But the interest, pathos, and poignancy of Shakespears warrior-heroes is produced by ignoring this distinction."