Giovanni Gentile - Selections

But we cannot think, we cannot open our eyes without sinking into a flood of sorrow from which we must struggle to the shore. And it cannot be otherwise, for thought is not intuition or immediate self-revelation. It is a process; this implies that we are always journeying and always arriving, yet never arriving. We "are" only insofar as we "are not"; and we suffer. The world fills itself with hostile and frightening phantoms; at every step we come to impassable barriers. Such is life even for the least tragic-minded. If we turn to comedy, what do we get? A superficial laugh. This is the inherent pain of thought, from which there would be no rest without the soothing effect of art. When a circle of thought is concluded and closed with the seal of feeling, the thinking subject erects itself aloft in its infinity and liberty. Then man feels the joy of life and the pride of power. In this return of the subject to itself lies the catharsis of all poetry and of all art. Life is a tragedy, in which man is subject to Fate. But this universal tragedy has its own catharsis, which is art, the eternal source of youth from which constantly springs and sparkles the magic water that makes life flow again in the dry reeds burned by the fires of thought.

from: The Philosophy of Art (Cornell University Press 1972 )