The first chapters of Piper at the Gates consider modernity’s crisis of knowledge as expressed in opera, drama, and the novel. Nietzsche’s pessimism about human culture in a post-religious and hyper-rational age is explored through the interpretations of Pierre Klossowski, who hints at an unexpected response informed by Henry Corbin’s diagnosis of late modern melancholia and his quest for a solution in Europe’s paradigm Other: the world of Islam. The book then moves on to consider the viability for us of this alternative mode of cognition as presented in the historic Islamic convivium of reason and ecstasy.