Van Gogh lived a life of poverty, Kafka was a depressed bureaucrat, and Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death, reprieved, then thrown into prison in his youth. One also recalls the famous line from The Third Man to the effect that fifty years of war and bloodshed created Leonardo, Michelangelo and the Italian Renaissance, while 500 years of peace and prosperity in Switzerland created--the cuckoo clock!
梵谷在貧困中創作、卡夫卡是個苦悶的小官僚、斯托也夫斯基差點被終生監禁……，有人甚至說，是五十年的政治血腥創造了米開朗基羅、達文西，而瑞士三百年的太平盛世，不過創造了咕咕鐘！