Yo soy yo y mi circumstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo. - José Ortega y Gasset

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. A strange thing, indeed, the existence in man of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another — from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. The symbol of art is seen again in the magic flute of the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove. All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world.

<small>Original: "La vida no puede esperar a que las ciencias expliquen científicamente el Universo. No se puede vivir ad kalendas graecas. El atributo más esencial de la existencia es su perentoriedad: la vida es siempre urgente. Se vive aquí y ahora sin posible demora ni traspaso. La vida nos es disparada a quemarropa. Ya la cultura, que no es sino su interpretación, no puede tampoco esperar."</small>