Yes, no.
I think that if I were to write the essay that you
were writing, it might be called "Suffering and Depression."
And maybe I'm thinking of the model
of Freud's Mourning and Melancholia,
but it's suffering.
It's not depression.
Suffering, you're sad because you have boils or your child
died or you've lost your fortune.
That's suffering.
And as you say, depression is in some other different category,
and the depression that is related to the tribulations
of an artist is different.
If I wrote that essay that you were
going to write on depression versus suffering,
if you wanted a counterbalance to Job, you might pick Saul.
He's the most famous depressive in the Bible, probably.
But things like the Michelangelo poem might be a thing.
The other thing to do would be to do the Psalms.
In the David book, I refer to the Psalms
as paranoid masterpieces because he does often
say how beset he is by his enemies.
They are masterpieces of paranoia.
And there's the pain of the imagination,
and there's the pain of objective reality.
You can have boils, or you can feel
you weren't cut out to be king or you weren't cut out
to be an artist or a poet, and here you are expected to be it.
And you don't have to trivialize or neglect either one of them.
You can respect both of them while making
a very important distinction, which
you're doing between them.