The Phoenix's Echo in the Fire of Imagination

Perhaps, if we don't want to be too pessimistic, we could say that the only use of unrequited love is to draw upon its sorrow in art; because, at the beginning of their work, the artist needs imagination, and the fuel for this process is the feeling of sorrow as a powerful and inspiring source.

Now the question is: why can't this fuel come from joy?

The answer is clear: in joy, a person inevitably lives in reality—truly and even soars—while in imagination, one is confined. (Conclusion: real joy and illusory sorrow.) Therefore, it can be interpreted that the artist never truly belongs to themselves, as they are always forced, in order to create art, to escape from reality—or joy—and walk barefoot in the world of illusions to bring a gift to others... (like Van Gogh, whose reservoir of innovations was named schizophrenia).

And in the end, the only thing they gain is immortality in history, but even that comes years or centuries after their death... From afar, this may seem like a kind of self-harm or even gradual suicide; but in truth, the artist cannot do otherwise by their very nature. They cannot act against their own being and mission; otherwise, their destruction is inevitable. Perhaps no one has ever understood that all their artistic creations are a kind of emotional discharge. They have come so that their hands are not stained with another's blood, at the cost of sacrificing every joyful moment of their own life, like the hero of Dostoevsky's "White Nights."

The artist, in relation to all the people on earth, experiences unrequited love; and to show it, all they need is a frame in which, through projection, the hero introduces this love to the subjects. In reality, unrequited love does not exist.