Skip to main content

PAIN

Some situations in this life are leveling.

You like to think that you are privileged to be able to walk past so much misery and boast about not having even a fraction of the problems that afflict the majority of people around you. It is invigorating to feel you are above suffering. But then, life calls you, “summons” you to your moment. Your moment to face your misery, your weakest side, your nothingness.

The moment when you realize that you are a man capable of suffering is the moment when life reveals itself. The curtain of illusion falls and the ghost of the inevitable appears. How can we deal with something so insignificant and, at the same time, so particularly important, visceral, vital? Aren’t we, after all, nothing but “cosmic dust”? Our pain is insignificant in the general scheme of things. Yes, but for us, it is almost everything. It surrounds us and practically encompasses all of life.  It keeps us alert, aware, yes, but also eager for the quickest possible end. Pain immediately gives us the perception of the futility of all effort and the desire to disappear into nothingness. 

Such a desire is inevitable, like pain itself. 

But then the question arises: how do we deal with such a situation if suicide is not an option? Short-term and long-term solutions abound. 

Meditation, meeting our “innermost”, surrendering to the embrace of the inevitable, begging for some Force that will  encompass us, that will suck all our energy, that will free us from ourselves. 

Religion. 

But it turns out that religion is just another form of suicide. It does not teach you how to deal with pain, but how to run away from it. To hide it. To postpone facing pain ad infinitum. 

But what I need, and want, is precisely not to go easy on existence. Not to “let it go”.  In the sense of believing, deceiving myself, that in the future everything will be resolved with a magic wand. It won't be. Everything that is happening now is happening, it is not a mirage or a creation of my head. All the pain that invades me has nothing metaphysical about it. It is all too physical. 

It is with this concrete discomfort that I have to deal. 

So, here I am, deprived of any shred of spirituality, dealing with suffering... of the spirit. Of my spirit. My anguish has no name or any purpose whatsoever. Nothing in the world will be better because I am suffering now. The days remain strictly the same. Not me. My vitality wants to fade away. My brain sometimes wants to shut down. 20 pills and it will all be over. No more pain. No more anguish. No more me. 

However, I do not want the comfortable way out (although I do not reject it definitively). I want to understand. I am eager to understand. I believe that I suffer more from incomprehension and impotence than anything else.  I cannot, I must not afford to go to sleep, to never get up again, without having completely exhausted my existence. And I have not exhausted it.

This is my intellectual remedy against the malaise that tries to take over my entire spirit. I have not exhausted my life. It is necessary for me to spend it until the very end. Until the moment when I literally cannot bear it anymore. Until the moment when I no longer desire anything. A moment that has not yet arrived.

Because I suffer, but I do not want to suffer. I am struggling with an irreparable loss, but I do not want to lose anything other than this irreplaceable thing. Because that would be enough to annihilate my mind once and for all. A loss is never easy to accept for an essentially selfish being. Especially when this loss represents the point of contact of this selfish person with the surrounding world. However, worse than the loss itself is the fragility that it exposes.

My fragility.

Today, pain takes over much more of me than it really should. I long to be strong.  I long to be a winner, a winner over my own weaknesses. But I suffer like anyone else. What encourages me is that this suffering has not mutilated my lucidity. I remain 100% here and 100% aware of myself. Of course I would prefer not to have to deal with misfortune. But it is as obviously inevitable as it is hard to deal with.

I am not sure that I will win this battle, or that I will come out of it unscathed. But I am still here, I continue to fight, and, in my own way, I continue to celebrate each new sunrise.

One day at a time. The most effective recipe against despair, the true name of evil.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ANARCHISM

    Introduction: Nothing to do?  The play Waiting for Godot , by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett , begins with one of the most famous lines in literature:   “Rien à faire”  ( Nothing to do ). That line is crucial to the understanding of the play and expresses man’s absolute inability to change anything around him. According to Beckett’s point of view, the individual in society is crushed by forces that he neither understands nor has the power to control or change. It is a perspective similar to that adopted by  Franz Kafka . For the latter, too, man is trapped in an absurd universe against which he cannot fight. The rules and impositions of society suffocate him, and when he has the slightest possibility of action, the very perception of the uselessness of everything ends up crushing his spirit.  Both Beckett and Kafka present worldviews that are perfect for literature. Literature thrives on  drama , and what greater drama is there than an indivi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Bazarov had to die

Some literary characters, like some books and some very special people, never leave us. They found a way to win a space in our hearts and our imagination, because they represent something that complements or enriches our experience in this world. And if at some point we must invariably say goodbye to these people, these characters who fascinate and enrich us, something in them always remains. The more our experience grows, and our self undergoes transformations and mutations that differentiate it increasingly from what it was when we met that special person, the more distant and opaque the memory becomes. But whenever we return to them, seeing a photo or rereading the book in which we met them, our memory is revived, and we realize that we need these special, unique beings, even if only as a mere reminder of the possibilities of human experience. Or as a reflection of a side of ourselves which we need to deal with and overcome, sooner or later. Evgeny Bazarov is one of those characters...
Post a Comment
Read more

Homo liber

  (…)   Here, where we are reviewing the “types” of men with whom we deal in the world, we finally see the real product of all the revolutions, all the transformations of human thought in recent centuries. This type of man, already seen as the bearer of absolute despair, of a meaningless, empty, absurd existence after the “death of God,” will, in fact, appear more as someone who has learned not to take things as seriously as religious men, philosophers, and scientists do. Literature, beginning in the 19th century with Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and, very strongly, in the 20th century, will explore this “human type” to exhaustion. Its most perfect model will certainly be Mersault, a character in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger . Mersault is the man who sees all things in life in a natural, direct way. He has a relationship with things and people that is not tied to artifice. He does not know how to play a character. If he does not feel any affection for his mot...
Post a Comment
Read more