Book: Diary

Stendhal syndrome is a medical term. He describes cases when a painting, and any work of art, is so beautiful that it stuns the viewer. A kind of shock. In 1817, when Stendhal visited the church of Santa Croce in Florence, he wrote in his diary that he almost fainted with joy. People have bouts of a frantic heartbeat. They're dizzy. When you look at great art, you forget what your name is, you even forget where you are and why you came there. Great art can drive into depression and cause exhaustion of the body. Amnesia. Panic. Infarct. Clinical death.

You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. About Mozart and his uremia. About Paul Klee and the scleroderma that twisted his joints and muscles and led to death. Frida Kahlo and a split spine that caused bleeding sores on her legs. Lord Byron and his limp. The Brontë sisters with their consumption. Mark Rothko with his suicide. Flannery O'Connor with cutaneous tuberculosis. Inspiration needs sickness, injury, madness.

There are many ways to commit suicide, it does not have to die.

Hard to forget pain but even harder to remember the joy. Happiness does not leave memorable scars.

This summer the people of their Holy Grail - the perfect table. Priestly throne. Position. The place where they sit, are always worse than where they are not.

You need to suffer to create good art.

If emotion can create a physical action, the reproduction of the physical action can re-create the emotion.

Plato said: "He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration, with the belief that rather of only one skill, and will remain a shoemaker, and his haughty poetry outshine the songs of the maniacs".

... This is typical of the American dream - shut out of the money.

Who knows where our ideas. Our inspiration. Why do we invent what we come up with.

Dermo - aesthetic clichés.

... they should be higher representational art. Drawing beautiful pictures. It was assumed that they should learn the visual sarcasm. Beautiful picture teaches nothing of the world.

Every time some well-wisher makes you demonstrate that you have no talent, and pokes his nose in the fact that you failed to fulfill the only dream of your life, have some wine.

Strange we can make any sense.