By titling his reflections on anguish as a business or trade of living, Pavese treats pain, writing, and solitude not as accidents to be escaped but as the daily labor one is obliged to perform. The emotional disciplines of endurance become a craft with its own methods and recurring failures, not a disease seeking cure.
Pavese argues that becoming an artist is not inventing something new but returning to the images and intensities fixed in childhood, when experience was first absorbed as total and sacred. Creative power comes from reconnecting with the mythic weight things carried before we learned to treat them casually.
Pavese reads his repeated romantic failures not as bad luck but as evidence he sought in others a verdict he had already passed on himself. Rejection does not wound a stable self; it ratifies a pre-existing conviction of worthlessness, so the lover unconsciously selects outcomes that prove the sentence.