The artistic life is a long and lovely suicide precisely because it involves the negation of self; as Highsmith imagined herself as her characters, so Ripley takes on the personae of others and in doing so metamorphoses himself into a 'living' work of art. A return to the 'real life' after a period of creativity resulted in a fall in spirits, an agony Highsmith felt acutely. She voiced this pain in the novel via Bernard's quotation of an excerpt from Derwatt's notebook: 'There is no depression for the artist except that caused by a return to the self'.
Andrew Wilson, Patricia Highsmith, Ζωή στο σκοτάδι
agony, art, artist, artistic-life, creativity, depression, fall, life, metamorphoses, metamorphosis, negation-of-self, pain, personae, real-life, self, suicide, work-of-art