Doesn't have to be all sunshine and rainbows stuff, rather writers who you feel were just genuinely curious about the world, and enjoyed living in it.
Joyce, Pynchon, and Eco strike me as such. Maybe Calvino as well? Postmodernists seem to be having fun, more often than not. But writers from any era/movement are welcome.
Thanks!
Wallace Steven's, definitely.
Voltaire, just look at all those smug portraits.
R U M I N O T R U P I
and sterne, lookit that imp bastard.
Is this a good translation?
Add Robbie Burns and Robbie Frost
The Greeks (except for maybe Heraclitus)
Petrarch
Malory
The Evangelists
Whoever wrote the Vegas
Most religious writers, really
Wallace Stevens
Emerson
Twain
Yes.
Joyce and Pynchon sure were depressed at some moment of their lifes
Good, thank you.
Gabo
Nabokov
Wilde
Definitely Oscar Wilde, for one.
Twain was depressed. By the end of his life he was sure it was just a cruel Joke. Emerson is relentlessly positive, but probably as a sort of coping mechanism for personal tragedies, most specifically his true love's death.
Joyce was definitely depressed. Pynchon I don't know. Seems pretty likely though.
If you want to say that Joyce, Emerson &c. overcame depression through life-affirmation (a good case can be made, I think), then you ought to include Melville. He's pretty depressed in and after Moby Dick, especially in Pierre, but by the Confidence Man he seems to have attained something akin to enlightenment. If Joyce was a Bodhisattva who refused Buddhahood for the benefit of mankind, then Melville was an actual Buddha.
Best Translation is Lathrop by a huge margin. And his book is cheaply available in Signet classic.
Diderot.
Goethe (except sorrows of yung werther) is pretty happy
i'm reading focault's pendulum and i think Eco is self-inserting a bit with the character of Belbo, who definitely is depressed. but depressed is a wide term, i think most people in the world with artistic inclination would probably fit it
Divad Retsof Ecallaw
Joyce, Proust, Tolstoy during his writing, Kafka (neighbors heard him laughing while writing). Pretty much the truly elite writers.
That's because Goethe lived life on easy mode and he wrote Sorrows of Young Werther because he thought something was wrong with him that like, he should be depressed because other young people were depressed but he was just so God damned good at everything, and then, because he was so God damned good at everything and loved life on easy mode, he wrote a book that literally made young people start killing themselves, which made him be like, "holy shit I'm so fucking good I can never write shit like this ever again," and he didn't. Don't worry, he felt bad that the young were killing themselves because of his book but, like, it didn't make him depressed or anything because Goethe lived life on easy mode and we're all not worth the dirt on his shoes.
>Most religious writers, really
lolno
Nice bait. Read Kafka's diary.