Orwell: “It is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.”

There’s a common script about about artists who live hard and die young. It says that the combination of a self-destructive lifestyle and art means that they were in some way fully alive, in a way that would be impossible, say, for some happily married husband and father, living in the suburbs and working as an editor. Indeed, the script reaches beyond the young and the dead to those who become obsessive about the pursuit of something. In this case, it says that the purity and single-mindedness of their obsession, even as they sacrifice other values and people along the way, shows that they are living fully. I am extraordinarily hesitant to judge whether other people are living fully. The economist who inhabits one corner of my soul tells me that people make choices, and those choices generate costs and benefits. If a mountain-climber dies while trying to summit a lofty peak, I am willing to consider the possibiliy that the climber was willing to make that tradeoff. But many other…