This incredible, short piece by Pico Iyer captures some of the heavy psychological burdens of creativity. Indeed, many of my literary colleagues talk about the writer’s “pain cave,” while a theme in my young writer’s life sang of a “curse of consciousness.” Neither is a very far cry from Pico’s “Art of Darkness”:
“To what extent is the price of immortality humanity, as you could put it? Must the revolutionary artist ignore — even flout — the basic laws of decency that govern our world in order to transform that world? “Perfection of the life, or of the work,” as Yeats had it. “And if it take the second,” he went on, the intellect of man “must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.” It was an ancient question even then..”
Continue Reading Pico Iyer’s “Art of Darkness” at The New York Times–>
Iyer’s forthcoming Art of Stillness book will be the second on the TED Books imprint, a collaboration between TED conferences and Simon & Schuster.