‘In Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky insisted that “too great a lucidity is a disease, a true, full-fledged disease,” that the artist’s heightened consciousness forced him to recognize unbearable truths, hidden from ordinary mortals.’
‘Friedrich Nietzsche – who confessed that Dostoyevsky was “the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had something to learn” – also associated the creative spirit with extreme pain and mental anguish, but took this idea one stage further. He argued that artistic greatness could be earned only by suffering, and that the artist must induce the creative spirit: “To make oneself sick, made, to provoke the symptoms of derangement and ruin – that was becoming stronger, more superhuman, more terrible, wiser.” The artist’s derangement gave him the power to see and tell the truth, and his suffering was paid with insight.’
‘Jean-Paul Sartre voiced the quintessential modern idea that the writer’s talent was closely connected to his capacity for self-ruin: “In relation to Gauguin, van Gogh and Rimbaud, I have a distinct inferiority complex because they managed to destroy themselves … I am more and more convinced that, in order to achieve authenticity, something has to snap.”‘
‘[Lowell] loved the idea of falling in love, and in his recurring manic episodes he needed women at the center of his emotional and artistic life. Each affair became an intense dramatic episode. […] he idealized his loves …’
