--- so this started me thinking about how situations can be exaggerated and fabricated in our own minds to create something far more dramatic than life has actually given us. Zelda Fitzgerald explains this pretty much perfectly for me: "We are very happy but we don't seem to care whether we are or not, I suppose we expect something more dramatic." Is happiness really interesting? There is nothing extraordinary about it, nothing inspirational. It is comfort, and comfort encourages immobility. We get bored.
"But her longing for a change possibly, too, the unrest caused by masculine presence, had sufficed to make her believe that she was at last possessed of that wonderful passion which, till then, had hovered like a great bird with roseate wings floating in the splendour of poetic skies; and now she could not believe her present unemotional state was the bliss whereof she had dreamed." Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
In order to be touched by creativity, must there be a touch of delusion? Evidence as strong as figures like Lord Byron and Dylan Thomas could suggest this. Creative types like writers and artists often deliberately induce themselves into a state of delusion; opium smokers like Wilkie Collins and Coleridge, and late-night-cheese-eaters like Salvador Dali used their methods of hallucination in order to inspire creative greatness.
But how far can this delusion go before it is illness?
When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time... When I was crazy, that's all I was. - Sylvia Plath
Or, in order to be human, must we dream?
T.S. Eliot observed that "human kind cannot bear much reality"
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