Once upon a time there was a child who had a golden brain. His parents only discovered this by chance when he injured his head and gold instead of blood flowed out. They then began to look after him carefully and would not let him play with other children for fear of being robbed. When the boy was grown up and wanted to go out into the world, his mother said: “We have done so much for you,we ought to be able to share your wealth.” Then her son took a large piece of gold out of his brain and gave it to his mother. He lived in great style with a friend who, however, robbed him one night and ran away. After that the man resolved to guard his secret and to go out to work, because his reserves were visibly dwindling. One day he fell in love with a beautiful girl who loved him too, but no more than the beautiful clothes he gave her so lavishly. He married her and was very happy, but after two years she died and he spent the rest of his wealth on her funeral, which had to be splendid. Once, as he was creeping through the streets,weak,poor, and unhappy, he saw a beautiful little pair of boots that would have been perfect for his wife. He forgot that she was dead- perhaps because his emptied brain no longer worked- and entered the shop to buy the boots. But in that very moment he fell, and the shopkeeper saw a dead man lying on the ground.This story sounds as though it were invented, but it is true from beginning to end. There are people who have to pay for the smallest things in life with their very substance and their spinal cord. That is a constantly recurring pain, and then when they are tired of suffering…Does not mother love belong to the ‘smallest’, but also indispensable, things in life, for which many people paradoxically have to pay by giving up their living selves?
It is a property of works of genius that, even when they represent vividly the nothingness of things, even when they clearly show and make you feel the inevitable unhappiness of life, even when they express the most terrible despair, nevertheless to a great soul that finds itself in a state of extreme dejection, disenchantment, nothingness, boredom, and discouragement about life, or in the most bitter and deathly misfortune (whether on account of lofty, powerful passions or something else), such works always bring consolation, [260] and rekindle enthusiasm, and, though they treat and represent nothing but death, they restore, albeit momentarily, the life that it had lost. And so, while that which is seen in the reality of things grieves and kills the soul, when seen in imitation or any other form in works of genius (e.g., in lyric poetry, which is not, properly speaking, imitation), it opens and revives the heart. In fact, just as the author who described and felt so powerfully the vanity of illusions, but still preserved a great fund of them and gave ample proof of this by conveying their vanity so accurately (see pp. 214–15), in the same way, the reader, however disillusioned both about himself and about what he reads, is yet drawn by the author into the same deception and illusion that he experienced and that are hidden in the most intimate recesses of his spirit. And the recognition of the irredeemable vanity and falsity of all beauty and all greatness is itself a kind of beauty and greatness that fills the soul when it is conveyed by a work of genius." from "Zibaldone