She had this to say about it:
“Pain is an extinguisher
that can put out the sun.“
Her wise words immediately reminded of something
someone said to me many years ago.
My then boss, who was the head of an overseas
aid agency, had severe toothache. He told me that the pain was so bad that
tears rolled down his face when he was being interviewed by a journalist. He
said she probably thought that he was crying for the poor people of Africa, but
it was just the toothache!
He went on to say that the pain was so
intense it filled the world and drove everything else out.
This is spot on. Both he and Stella Benson
got it right. Pain does take over completely; everything else recedes and
disappears.
Nothing else seems real. People often stop
caring about anything else, and in any case have no spare capacity for dealing
with anything else. I know this from experience.
How can we feel much interest in things our
pain prevents us from participating in? What does it matter if ‘Hollywood
values’, political correctness, diversity for its own sake and other ideologies
are ruining everything? Who cares who wins the election?
So what if Kim Jong Un might launch nuclear
missiles and destroy us all – we only wish he would: it would put us out of our
misery!
In the case of my former boss, an emergency
appointment with the dentist solved his problem. He was soon back to normal and
put the pain from the toothache behind him, but other kinds of pain ruin
people’s lives and prevent them from reaching their full potential and working
to make the world a better place.
Maybe some excruciatingly painful experiences
are arranged by malign unseen influences to sabotage people’s lives.
Science fiction writer Dean Koontz, who like
Stella Benson had an alcoholic father, has a lot to say about pain. He also
mentions the way it drives everything else out, although he does see a positive
side in this:
