Maybe, & I'm sure that that's what happened with the Vanyar. However, the fate of the Noldor is more interesting, admirable, poignant & fulfilling as Art. The light grows, flourishes & dims. We are born, grow, & die. That is our tragedy, but from it comes our potential for glory as a race & more importantly as individuals.
Would Mozart's music have contained the beauty it did if it had not come out of his experience as a Man (a mortal who will die), & would it speak to us as it does if we did not share his mortality? Living forever in a nice peaceful world is a nice fantasy, but a boring reality, which would not produce 'Art' but blandness, because nothing would actually matter - in fact it probably wouldn't produce anything much, because we could do it tomorrow or the day after or the day after that. 'Corruption', death, breaking down, is another word for liberation, because it frees us from the past & liberates us to do something new. The fact that other potential Mozarts, Platos, Einsteins, have been lost inspires us to do what they might have done if they'd had the chance.
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"I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been & couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost & spent & wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed." The Other Wind....Ursula Le Guin
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