It's not success that makes a person's life worthy of legend. It's provocative defeat, someone who struggled mightily and lost. And that loss can't just be gratuitous - there has to be something about his or her character that whittles that loss into something provocative.

Aristocratic depression has this cosmic dimension to it, where it's asking these big questions about, Why? What is the purpose of all this? Neuroses of the middle class is the banishment of aristocratic depression, because it's kind of this obsession with quotidian detail that pushes these larger questions away.