Coursing through every civilization are the myths that shape what its people come to believe about reality and possibility. Some of them are healing and some damaging. Some are easy to recognize for what they are — almost all isms are damaging myths. But some are more subtle, more pernicious, permeating the substratum of culture and the marrow of the psyche.

One of Western culture’s most damaging myths, largely inherited from the Romantics, is that of the tortured genius — the suffering artist who needs to have suffered and must go on suffering in order to create works of beauty and poignancy, portals to the sacred. The truth, of course, is far more nuanced — artists are simply people who feel life deeply in all of its dimensions, who are awake and alive to both its tragedy and its transcendence, who put their heightened sensitivity in the service of wakefulness and aliveness for others.

Virginia Woolf knew this when she wrote of the shock-receiving capacity necessary for being an artist. In his diary, Walt Whitman contemplated the superior porousness of the creative spirit to both life’s “sunny expanses and sky-reaching heights” and its “bare spots and darknesses,” believing that “no artist or work of the very first class may be or can be without them.”

These, of course, are the polarities we all live with, the polarities that live in us, which Maya Angelou channeled in her stunning poem “A Brave and Startling Truth.” The artist is humanity’s magnifying lens for the inherent dualities of human nature — something James Baldwin captured in his insistence that an artist’s role is “to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.” The measure of our creative vitality lies in how intimately we contact both the doom and the glory of being, what we make of the restless tension between our own poles, how we harmonize them into something beautiful.

Hermann Hesse

In the interlude between two world wars, as humanity hungered for beauty to controvert its own brutality, Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) considered the inner life of the creative spirit in a poignant passage from his 1927 novel Steppenwolf (public library), painting the artist as a divided creature that yearns for wholeness and turns that yearning into the creative act:

Many artists… have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them; the mother’s blood and the father’s; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man.

For Hesse’s artist, riven by these inner tensions, “life has no repose.” And yet out of that restlessness comes the artist’s gift to the world:

[Artists] live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment’s happiness is flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own.

Complement with other excellent reflections on what it means to be an artist from e.e. cummings, M.C. Richards, Egon Schiele, and Marina Abramović, then revisit Hesse on the courage to be yourself, the wisdom of the inner voice, and how to be more alive.

Not long after writing about the bowerbird’s enchantment in blue, I walked out of my house and gasped at the sight of what looked like two extraordinary jewels sparkling on a bed of yellow leaves, right there on the sidewalk — chunks of cobalt glass, much larger than what a broken bottle would yield, luminous in the low afternoon light.

I held one up to the sun and gasped deeper.

For millennia — since long before cobalt became the blood diamond of the digital age, pillaged from the Earth by child labor for its extraordinary usefulness in storing energy and stabilizing the conductors in every laptop and smartphone — cobalt glass has been answering the soul’s cry of the great uselessness that makes life not just livable but worth living: beauty.

Cobalt blue is almost as old as the written word, also forged in Mesopotamia four millennia ago. Within five centuries of its invention, Egyptian pottery was making ample and dazzling use of cobalt glass. And then, after the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt at the end of the Late Bronze Age, it suddenly vanished — after 1250 BC, both cobalt and glass almost completely disappear from the archeological record. It took more than a millennium for it to recast its enchantment in Chinese porcelain, slowly migrating west toward the Victorian craze for blue glass.

The mystery of its disappearance has never been solved — a harrowing reminder that ideas, even magnificent ideas, can fall into oblivion for epochs: just look at Democritus and the atom.

And yet the birth of an idea in a mind — the conception of something improbable and lovely out of the cold clay of the ordinary — is one of the great miracles of existence. Looking through the sunlit blue on a Brooklyn sidewalk, I can’t help but think of cobalt glass a supreme emblem of human ingenuity and the blessed conspiracy of chance and choice behind all creativity: Who was it, the first ancient person to unearth a piece of meteoric iron, throw it into the fire pit to see what happens, watch it release a dazzling silvery metal, compact that metal to the point of liquefaction, and then watch it bleed that loveliest of colors, cobalt blue? What elemental hunger for beauty drove them then to add this strange creation to that supreme triumph of human genius, glass?

How they too must have gasped when the sun first shone through it.

Cupping this blue marvel in my hand, I feel instantly connected to that anonymous ancestor, connected to the entire lineage of human curiosity and creativity that made so improbable and lovely a thing consecrate an ordinary afternoon with wonder. And none of it had to exist — not this dazzling blue, not the consciousness that dreamt it up: all of it a miracle of chemistry and chance, a great cosmic gasp at these slender sunlit odds against nothingness and eternal night.

“The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use,” computing pioneer Alan Turing wrote as he contemplated the binary code of body and spirit in the spring of his twenty-first year, having just lost the love of his life to tuberculosis. Nothing garbles that code more violently than illness — from the temporary terrors of food poisoning to the existential tumult of a terminal diagnosis — our entire mental and emotional being is hijacked by the demands of a malcontented body as dis-ease, in the most literal sense, fills sinew and spirit alike. These rude reminders of our atomic fragility are perhaps the most discomfiting yet most common human experience — it is difficult, if at all possible, to find a person unaffected by illness, for we have all been or will be ill, and have all loved or will love someone afflicted by illness.

No one has articulated the peculiar vexations of illness, nor addressed the psychic transcendence accessible amid the terrors of the body, more thoughtfully than Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) in her 1926 essay “On Being Ill,” later included in the indispensable posthumous collection of her Selected Essays (public library).

Portrait of Virginia Woolf from Literary Witches.

Half a century before Susan Sontag’s landmark book Illness as Metaphor, Woolf writes:

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth — rinse the mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us — when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache. But no; with a few exceptions — De Quincey attempted something of the sort in The Opium Eater; there must be a volume or two about disease scattered through the pages of Proust — literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent.

Five years earlier, the ailing Rilke had written in a letter to a young woman: “I am not one of those who neglect the body in order to make of it a sacrificial offering for the soul, since my soul would thoroughly dislike being served in such a fashion.” Woolf, writing in the year of Rilke’s death and well ahead of the modern scientific inquiry into how the life of the body shapes the life of the mind, rebels against the residual Cartesianism of the mind-body divide with her characteristic fusion of wisdom and wry humor, channeled in exquisite prose:

All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane — smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher’s turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth. Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism.

Art from the vintage science primer The Human Body: What It Is and How It Works.

“Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” Nietzsche had asked when Woolf was just genetic potential in her parents’ DNA. Language, the fully formed human argues as she considers the unreality of illness, has been utterly inadequate in conferring upon this commonest experience the dignity of representation it confers upon just about every other universal human experience:

To hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way.

In a passage Oliver Sacks could have written, Woolf pivots to the humorous, somehow without losing the profundity of the larger point:

Yet it is not only a new language that we need, more primitive, more sensual, more obscene, but a new hierarchy of the passions; love must be deposed in favour of a temperature of 104; jealousy give place to the pangs of sciatica; sleeplessness play the part of villain, and the hero become a white liquid with a sweet taste — that mighty Prince with the moths’ eyes and the feathered feet, one of whose names is Chloral.

And then, just like that, in classic Woolfian fashion, she fangs into the meat of the matter — the way we plunge into the universality of illness, so universal as to border on the banal, until we reach the rock bottom of utter existential aloneness:

That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you — is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.

Art by Nina Cosford from the illustrated biography of Virginia Woolf

In health, Woolf argues, we maintain the illusion, both psychological and outwardly performative, of being cradled in the arms of civilization and society. Illness jolts us out of it, orphans us from belonging. But it also does something else, something beautiful and transcendent: In piercing the trance of busyness and obligation, it awakens us to the world about us, whose smallest details, neglected by our regular societal conscience, suddenly throb with aliveness and magnetic curiosity. It renders us “able, perhaps for the first time for years, to look round, to look up — to look, for example, at the sky”:

The first impression of that extraordinary spectacle is strangely overcoming. Ordinarily to look at the sky for any length of time is impossible. Pedestrians would be impeded and disconcerted by a public sky-gazer. What snatches we get of it are mutilated by chimneys and churches, serve as a background for man, signify wet weather or fine, daub windows gold, and, filling in the branches, complete the pathos of dishevelled autumnal plane trees in autumnal squares. Now, lying recumbent, staring straight up, the sky is discovered to be something so different from this that really it is a little shocking. This then has been going on all the time without our knowing it! — this incessant making up of shapes and casting them down, this buffeting of clouds together, and drawing vast trains of ships and waggons from North to South, this incessant ringing up and down of curtains of light and shade, this interminable experiment with gold shafts and blue shadows, with veiling the sun and unveiling it, with making rock ramparts and wafting them away…

But in the consolations of this transcendent communion with nature resides the most disquieting fact of existence — the awareness of an unfeeling universe, operating by impartial laws unconcerned with our individual fates:

Divinely beautiful it is also divinely heartless. Immeasurable resources are used for some purpose which has nothing to do with human pleasure or human profit.

Drawing from The Comet Book — a 16th-century pre-astronomical document of magical thinking about the laws of the universe.

It would take Woolf more than a decade to fully formulate, in a most stunning reflection, the paradoxical way in which these heartless laws are the very reason we are called to make beauty and meaning within their unfeeling parameters: “There is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself,” she would write in 1939. Now, in her meditation on illness, she hones the anchor of these ideas:

Poets have found religion in nature; people live in the country to learn virtue from plants. It is in their indifference that they are comforting. That snowfield of the mind, where man has not trodden, is visited by the cloud, kissed by the falling petal, as, in another sphere, it is the great artists, the Miltons and the Popes, who console not by their thought of us but by their forgetfulness.

[…]

It is only the recumbent who know what, after all, Nature is at no pains to conceal — that she in the end will conquer; heat will leave the world; stiff with frost we shall cease to drag ourselves about the fields; ice will lie thick upon factory and engine; the sun will go out.

This sudden awareness of elemental truth renders the ill person a sort of seer, imbued with an almost mystical understanding of existence, beyond any intellectual interpretation. Nearly a century before Patti Smith came to contemplate how illness expands the field of poetic awareness, Woolf writes:

In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other — a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause — which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke, when collected, a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain. Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow. In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poem by Mallarmé or Donne, some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent and distil their flavour, and then, if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having come to us sensually first, by way of the palate and the nostrils, like some queer odour.

Complement this portion of Woolf’s thoroughly fantastic Selected Essays with Roald Dahl on how illness emboldens creativity and Alice James — Henry and William James’s brilliant sister, whom Woolf greatly admired — on how to live fully while dying, then revisit Woolf on the art of letters, the relationship between loneliness and creativity, the creative potency of the androgynous mind, and her transcendent account of a total solar eclipse.

Uncommon Presents from the Past: Gifts for the Science-Lover and Nature-Ecstatic in Your Life, Benefitting the Nature Conservancy