My Years With Proust - Day 703

Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure our heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy.  But successors only in the order of time, for the primary element, it seems, is the Idea, and grief is merely the mode in which certain ideas make their fist entry into us.  But within the tribe of ideas there are various families and some of them from the very first moment are joys.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 944

"Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure our heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy."  We've bandied around the idea that suffering is the heart of the creative process, and although it may seem like an old chestnut I still suspect that it is true.  However, when the "grief" becomes an "idea," then we have intellectualized it and thus it no longer packs the same sting.  Of course, we've also oddly defiled it by dragging it from the realm of emotion to the realm of the intellect, as much as we'd like to think of the latter world as purified.  We've simply repackaged it and sucked the life out of it, sort of the emotional equivalent of one of those plastic storage bags that you hook up to a vacuum to suck out the oxygen, and in the process create enough room to store under your bed or at the back of your closet.