"It is not a matter of ascertaining whether Hölderlin was or was not crazy, nor whether he believed himself to be. What is of decisive importance is that, in fact, he wanted to be so-or, rather, that at a certain point madness struck him as a necessity, something he could not avoid, lest he become a coward, since, 'like old Tantalus... the gods had given him more than he could bear'. It has been said of both Swift and Gogol that they did everything they could to go mad, and in the end they succeeded. Hölderlin did not seek madness, he had to accept it; but, as Bertaux notes, his conception of madness had nothing to do with our notions of mental illness. It was, rather, something that could or should be inhabited. That is why, when he translates Sophocles' Ajax, he renders the phrase theiai maniai xynaulos, literally 'dwelling with divine madness', as sein Haus ist göttliche Wahnsinn, 'his house is divine madness."
— Holed Up, Giorgio Agamben