The Power of the Bittersweet: Susan Cain on Longing as the Fulcrum of Creativity – The Marginalian
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The Power of the Bittersweet: Susan Cain on Longing as the Fulcrum of Creativity
By Maria Popova
“Oh, there must be a little bit of air, a little bit of happiness… to let the form be felt… but let the whole be sombre,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother as he exulted in the beauty of sorrow — not in that wallowing way some have of making an identity of their suffering, not in the way our culture has of fetishizing the tortured genius myth, but in the way of Whitman, who saw the plain equivalence between feeling deeply all of life’s hues and so touching its beauty more deeply, the contact we call art: Those who reach “sunny expanses and sky-reaching heights,” Whitman knew, are also apt “to dwell on the bare spots and darknesses.” He had "a theory that no artist or work of the very first class may be or can be without them”; his own life was living proof of that theory. Two millennia before him, Aristotle too had wondered why an undertone of melancholy seems to reverberate across the personalities of the most fertile minds, the greatest leaders, and the finest artists.
Moonlight, Winter by Rockwell Kent. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)<br>I too have wondered this while falling in love with the people I live with — Rachel Carson, with her uncommon grasp of the beauty inside the tragedy of transience; Rockwell Kent, who...