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The list of artists that circled the drain because of their art is a long one: Ambrose Bierce, Van Gogh, Seurat, Proust, Virginia Woolf, Diane Arbus, Randall Jarrell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Jerzy Kozinski, Hemingway, Faulkner, James Dickey, and Rothko. All of them went into the dark in their own way, and didn’t come back.

A friend of mine was interviewing a Holocaust survivor and artist the other day. She said, “There is one thing I have never understood. As we get older and gain more experience, why don’t we become wiser? It has only been in the last few years that I have begun to understand.”

I said to my friend, “This is just a guess, but I think we are wired to do, but not to understand. It is only in the latter years of our life when the wiring gets frayed that we can begin to understand who we are, what we have done, and why we did it.”

A passionate inwardness is not conducive to good self-esteem.

It is a great thing to be passionately inward and to be able to write a sentence about it; but it’s like performing surgery on yourself. We may need to be physically and psychologically strong to defeat a bad sentence. I tend to see writing as closer to martial arts. I strike out words. I throw out sentences. I cut paragraphs. It is a contest of pinning words to paper, of cornering words on a page. At my age understanding is just something I stumble upon in that process.

I don’t think that physical or psychological strength is enough to survive as an artist. Optimism is helpful but research shows that denial is the principal defense mechanism of the happy few. The primary defense mechanism of pessimism is self-deception. Happy people tend to overestimate their worth: they think they are better writers than they are. They may write more and publish more. Research shows that unhappy people come closer to the truth. They manage their painful truths by self-deception, and thus are able to do. (At one psychological conference, the participants decided that happiness was such a rare state that it was almost pathological. They suggested a new diagnosis to be used in psychiatry: Major Affective Disorder, Pleasant Type.)

Understanding is an impediment to evolution. It is better not to know and just do to survive than to understand and not be able to do. When we get old, evolution rules out and we can finally understand. We’ve no need to do anymore. The genetic imperative is fulfilled. We are now free to understand.

The artists that survive pessimism and going into the dark must have the ability to tolerate distress. That is no easy task. Even worse, they must tolerate it alone. It is an existential corridor with many doors of escape but only one key. The artists have to deceive themselves into believing that there is no key, and tolerate that corridor.

I don’t want to interpret that writer’s reality, but running is akin to REM sleep, and that has nothing to with being physically strong. Running is the act of throwing out what will drag you under. It is practicing physical and psychological distress tolerance. It gives you a chance to get lucky along the way and stumble on the truth. It may just let you live long enough to start understanding.