Beauty and Despair

My friend and chevruta Peninah is currently reading Tormented master: the life and spiritual quest of Rabbi Naḥman of Bratslav, a biography of one of her greatest sources for inspiration. Peninah loves to talks about Rebbe Nachman's teachings, which, she tells me, are very beautiful. The title of the biography, she was explaining, derives from the many unhappy aspects of the famous Rebbe's short life (he died at age 37). Since his death, some have inferred symptoms of anorexia and depression from his apparent mood swings and asceticism.
My initial feeling when I hear such stories about famous novelists, poets, artists, and thinkers who die while still relatively young and absolutely miserable, is that it is unfortunate that they died so soon, and could not continue to bestow their achievements on the world.
Without even thinking particularly long or hard about many of my favorite writers, I can name among them any number of what the ancient Greeks called the "untimely ones," or those who died while still in the prime of their lives. Many of these lived through tragedy and misery, and did not know fame in their own lifetimes. Edgar Allen Poe died at age 40, after seeing many of his close family members, including his wife and mother, both wither away under the effects of tuberculosis. Kafka, who had lived his entire life as an outsider in the marginalized Jewish community of Vienna died at 40, leaving instructions for the executor of his will to burn all of his work (this is one final wish that I am glad was not honored). Stephen Crane died at age 28 of tuberculosis, and yet left us an enormous corpus of novels, short stories, and reportage. Impending death can often inspire artists to entirely new planes of perfection: Keats died at 26, and for those of you who have studied his poetry, his own mortality breathing down his neck transformed him into a mature poet during the last years of his life.
I can also think of many examples of miserable, though admittedly longer lives, led by great writers. Baruch Spinoza quite literally ground out many of his 44 years making lenses, dying in exile from the community in which he was born, which had treated hims as dead since he was 23. My favorite American poet, Emily Dickinson, may have lived into her mid-50s, but she was an eccentric recluse right up to the end. Ernest Hemingway relished and advertised his misery more than just about any other writer I can think of, whereas George Orwell just sucked up his own unhappiness, dying in a hospital from tuberculosis at age 46, having finished 1984 less than a year before.
Individual events of tragedy sometimes seem to inspire loftier works of art. Shakespeare composed Hamlet, arguably his greatest piece, soon after the death of his son Hamnet. As a young man, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his socialist associates suffered from a staged execution: led to the firing squad, fully prepared to die, the sentence was reversed at the last moment. The event traumatized him for the rest of his life. Incidentally, he finished The Brothers Karamazov, which, as he wrote in its preface, was only the prelude of a much greater work, a few months before his death at age 59. And don't even get me started about Oscar Wilde.
Do depression, sadness, and inspire great artwork? Or are all of our lives really shadow-ridden nightmares, which only become known to others when we are famous enough to have biographies written about us?

~JD

"Thus Vichy was not the product of pure expediency or opportunism. The new regime did not emerge from an ideological vacuum: the death of liberal democracy had been the stated intention of the revolutionary, nationalist and nonconformist Right ever since the last decade of the nineteenth century. For those defeated in the Dreyfus Affair and their intellectual heirs, the defeat of 1940 provided the opportunity to enact the principles they had defended forty years earlier: at Vichy the historicist, organicist and particularist tradition momentarily gained the ascendancy" (Zeev Sternhell, "Morphology of Fascism in France," p. 35).