In the birth of tragedy Nietzsche links tragic art to folk songs. Following Schopenhauer, he takes music—and not literary genre, historical ideas, philosophical concepts, actual suffering, or even pure storytelling—to be what originates, shapes, and carries tragedy’s expressive force. According to Nietzsche, the spontaneous appeal of rhythm and melody evoke a primal sense of unity with life and with the greater whole in which life is imbedded. First the music and then the words, insofar as words too are musical, well up out of these depths as specific, merely individual instances of a deeper, never-quite-articulated knowledge and, generally, tragic knowledge—because the final truth of our lives is this: we all must die. For Nietzsche this knowledge does not devalue living. It has the opposite effect. Death gives life a background that throws its contours into vivid relief. Death is the background against which we emphatically affirm love and joy, gratitude, beauty and the good. Death gives them form and definition.

Or is it art that gives form and definition to our grasp of life? Experience—Erlebnis—precedes art. In the beginning, says Goethe’s Faust in rewriting the Gospel of John, was the deed. Deeds and events are the stuff of art, susceptible of shaping, much as clay must be worked before it becomes a pot that will hold water. In a fit of rage, some teenaged boy shoots and kills his unfaithful girlfriend. The next day, we read in the newspaper of the previous night’s “tragic occurrence.” In everyday speech the turn of phrase refers to some disastrous event involving pain, suffering, grief and, most likely, death. Yet the word “tragic” comes from an ancient literary genre, while experience comes directly from the messily unpredictable business of living itself. To combine the two suggests that art shapes raw, unpredictable experience like a potter molds the clay that comes his way.