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Reading or seeing King Lear is a horrifying as well as uplifting experience. Discuss.

A true tragedy at once horrifies and elevates, and King Lear is no exception. As we see scenes of physical horror such as the blinding of Gloucester, his eyes being plucked and stamped out, and the more psychological ripples of terror of mad old Lear's ravings on the heath in storm and rain, we are surely horrified. But as we notice the octogenarian king in tattered clothes, accompanied by his Fool and the Bedlamite beggar, encounter the fury of the elements, feeling an empathy with 'the poor naked wretches or, in the end, the old regretful father carrying his angelic daughter, Cordelia, still believing her to be alive, we have  a sense of being sublimated to an almost cosmic level of suffering transcended.

Yes Shakespeare's tragedy  shows the horrors of filial ingratitude, cruelty, jealousy, adultery, crude violence. But the play also reveals exemplary love, loyalty, goodness so that the inhuman horrors are mitigated trough a process of learning by experiences.

Everything about Lear is over the top. His vanity and foolishness are extreme, and his eventual suffering seems beyond human endurance, yet he endures, in agony. The depth of Cordelia's abiding, sacrificial love makes the play's irony terribly poignant. The play emphasizes the darkness and the light of the human heart and the human condition in such a deeply personal, universal way that it touches us profoundly.