Waiting for the Dawn

"That which characterizes us as human and defines us vis-à-vis other orders of nature and God is the instinct for transcendence, tha craving to be freed from oneself and to pass over into the other, the urgent need to break the iron of idividuality. Dream, the safety valve of this thirst for transcendence, as well as art, magic, dance, and love and mysticism – these all testify from various angles to the fundamental and fated instinct of human nature for emergences from oneself and fusion with the other, for a flight from limited solitariness and a bounding toward perfect freedom in the freedom of the other.
It seems to me that art is nothing other than a magical transcendence of the object, its projection into another dimension, its liberation through magical realization and creativity. This dimension is difficult to specify, but the intuition of it provokes what is called an aesthetic thrill, which is really nothing but a magical joy at the victorious bursting of the iron band." Mircea Eliade, ”Literature and Fantasy”, în Waiting for the Dawn: Mircea Eliade in Perspective, David Carrasco and Jane Marie Law editors, University Press of Colorado, 1991, p. 62.