balance

how to live a life

Odilon Redon, Ophelia, 1905

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.

— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

I used to have this fear that I would never be a good writer because my life was too good. To write well, I thought, you had to have suffered, and I mean, truly suffered, not just failed a math test or applied to ten jobs out of college and gotten ten rejections. I was fully bought into the myth of the “struggling artist.” If you’re generally content with your life, how could you make good art?

Kierkegaard also struggled with this question. He broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen because he wanted to dedicate himself to writing and religious contemplation. He simply did not think it was possible to enjoy the happiness of married life while pursuing his spiritual vocation. She was shattered by his decision and fell into a severe depression. He tried to encourage her to move on by insisting he had fallen out of love with her. She asked him if he would ever marry, and he supposedly said, “Well, yes, in ten years, when I have begun to simmer down and I need a lusty young miss to rejuvenate me.” Poor Regine. (He didn’t mean it.)

He then went on to write Either/Or, which became a seminal work of existentialism. It poses the question of whether one should live an aesthetic life or an ethical life. The book is split into two parts: A, the aesthetic argument, and B, the ethical counterargument. In one of the most memorable chapters of A, “The Seducer’s Diary,” we are introduced to the exploits of Johannes the Seducer who lives only for the passion of the chase. His modus operandi is to use art and artifice to make women fall madly in love with him—only to abandon them. (Some speculate that in writing this, Kierkegaard was trying to expunge his guilt from breaking up with Regine.)

From “The Seducer’s Diary”:

I tense the bow of love to wound the deeper. Like an archer, I slacken the bowstring, tighten it again, listen to its song—it is my martial music—but I do not take aim with it yet, do not even lay the arrow on the string.

Johannes the Seducer is an extreme archetype, and very few people go around breaking hearts ruthlessly. Romantic seduction is just one flavor of the aesthetic life. More generally, to live an aesthetic life is to see your life as a story. Most people avoid drama, but some people attract it. They go on wild adventures, seek out interesting people, and put themselves in situations where they could get badly hurt. And they might hurt others out of their constant need for novelty and excitement, their inability to “simmer down.”

I don’t think it’s necessary to live this way in order to create good art, but there’s something to be said about surrounding yourself with people who can show you the full range of human experiences. And yes, suffering can produce beautiful art, though more than suffering, it’s sensitivity to complex stimuli that produces good art. Every artist is a version of Johannes the Seducer. Every artist tries to create interesting reflections to evoke an emotional response. There’s a reason some of the greatest works of music, art, and literature conjure the most powerfully poignant feelings. How many times have you watched a show you loved, listened to a song or read a story only to feel shattered/destroyed at the end, but in a good way because it’s cathartic, and you want more of it? That’s (artistic) seduction.

There are the aesthetes, and then there are the people who optimize their lives for stability. This is the “ethical” camp of the Kierkegaardian debate. And yes, settling down and having children is part of it. I love Selin’s somewhat biased way of explaining the difference in Elif Batuman’s novel Either/Or:

When it came to choosing friends, Svetlana liked to surround herself with dependable boring people who corroborated her in her way of being, while I was more interested in undependable people who generated different experiences or impressions.

Also:

It was somehow implicit in my friendship with Svetlana that she wanted to be in “a stable relationship” and to someday have children, while I wanted to have interesting love experiences that I could write about.

I think the “aesthetic” vs. the “ethical” is more a question of what you prioritize rather than picking one or the other (they’re not mutually exclusive, despite what the dichotomy “either/or” may suggest). If you prioritize family, by definition, you cannot prioritize your art. But that doesn’t mean you can’t fulfill your artistic ambitions. It just becomes harder to because there’s a higher priority competing for your time and attention. 

I want the stability of committed love, and I also want to fulfill my dreams as a writer. But the best thing that ever happened to my writing was also the most painful heartbreak I ever experienced. And when I was feeling the most content in my romantic relationship, I was less invested in making art. So is it possible to have it all? I think yes—I hope yes—but it requires a constant balancing and re-balancing of your time, energy, and resources. And maybe the perfect balance can never be achieved. Maybe it will always be a swinging pendulum between feeling more fulfilled in your relationships and more fulfilled in your art. And maybe that’s just what it means to be human: learning to live with competing desires, constantly feeling like something is missing, something has yet to be attained, and gradually becoming more comfortable with the discomfort of not having what you want.

As Oscar Wilde puts it in Lady Windermere’s Fan: 

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is getting what one wants, and the other is not getting it.