But all the same, when a living creature is so faultily constituted (and perhaps, if such a creature exists in nature, it is man) that he cannot love without suffering, and that he has to suffer in order to apprehend truths, the life of such a creature becomes in the end extremely wearisome. The happy years are the lost, the wasted years, one must wait for suffering before one can work. And then the idea of the preliminary suffering becomes associated with the idea of work and one is afraid of each new literary undertaking because one thinks of the pain one will first have to endure in order to imagine it. And once one understands that suffering is the best thing that one can hope to encounter in life, one thinks without terror, and almost as of a deliverance, of death.
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 947
Once again we are struggling with that old chestnut about how suffering is the seed of all great art. Proust reminds us, "The happy years are the lost, the wasted years, one must wait for suffering before one can work." I can remember the times when I was crazy happy in love, and I assure you that no classic novels were being written (several world records were being shattered, but, sadly, and happily, no profound novels were being written). This brings me back to my argument carried out a one bar or another with the esteemed Dave Kelley over whether it's better to be a painfully unoriginal but successful Victorian portrait painter or Paul Gauguin. Maybe this is all true because when you're happy and in love you're thinking of someone else, but when you're miserable you're completely living inside of your own sorrow, and art is the most lonely, egotistical, self-absorbed journey.
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