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The writer is the exemplary sufferer because he has found both the deepest level of suffering and also a professional means to sublimate (in the literal, not the Freudian, sense of sublimate) his suffering. As a man, he suffers; as a writer, he transforms his suffering into art. The writer is the m…

[...] Usually critics who want to praise a work of art feel compelled to demonstrate that each part is justified, that it could not be other than it is. And every artist, when it comes to his own work, remembering the role of chance, fatigue, external distractions, knows what the critic says to be …

All of which harkens back to Nietzsche's famous statement in The Birth of Tragedy: "Art is not an imitation of nature but its metaphysical supplement, raised up beside it in order to overcome it."

For morality, unlike art, is ultimately justified by its utility: that it makes, or is supposed to make, life more humane and livable for us all. But consciousness--what used to be called, rather tendentiously, the faculty of contemplation--can be, and is, wider and more various than action. It has…