“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.1” So wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novel, Crime and Punishment. He spoke well. Suffering serves people as a fire serves gold: to prove and to purify. One of the ways it does this is by shaping a person’s perspective so that he may begin to understand the people who suffer beside him and so that he may begin to glimpse the things which matter most. This, according to Dostoevsky, is what it means to be one of those “really great men”—or women: to pass through deep sadness which “passes gradually into quiet tender joy.2” It is through suffering that people can have a truer perspective on the world.
An individual’s perspective is shaped by his or her experience. If a person has never suffered, how can that person have a perspective on the suffering of others that is able to be sympathetic? How can people know what they have not experienced? Our sympathy for those suffering from starvation is greatly increased if we ever go hungry. Our ability to comfort others stems from our own experience of a similar pain. On the night I broke my leg falling on Mt. Katahdin I remember being wheeled into the emergency room and passing an adjacent room in which an older man was dying from a heart attack; and as I lay on my bed there, I could hear a little boy moaning in pain on the other side of the sickly pastel dividing curtain. Before, I could have sympathized with them on an intellectual level: I could have understood that they were uncomfortable. However, I could not have understood their pain in a meaningful, experiential, genuine way, and even my best-intentioned effort to console them would have sounded cold if I had never suffered in a similar way. It is through suffering that people gain a perspective that enables them to sympathize with others who have suffered.
This understanding, sympathetic perspective that is gained through suffering lends clarity on those things in life which matter most. It is in moments of pain or sorrow that people have their eyes opened to see the most important things: when the house is burning down, make sure the kids get out. When deep tragedy strikes on the eleventh of September, it is time to cancel school and to go home to be with mom and dad. In times of economic drought, people learn what it is they really need. It is as though a film accumulates on the eyes when there is no suffering but only ease. A season of suffering serves to clear this film away. It cures the perspective and gives it clarity to see again the things that matter more than anything else.
And if, as Dostoevsky claims, "The really great men must...have great sadness on earth," then the greatest of them is he who suffered most: he who suffered for unnumbered crimes not his own; he who was alone in the valley of the shadow of death. It is he who lives now to sympathize perfectly. It is he who sees all things most clearly.
1Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. <http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/66336-pain-and-suffering-are-always-inevitable-for-a-large intelligence?auto_login_attempted=true>.
2Dostoevsky, Fyodor. <http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/54235-it-s-the-great-mystery-of-human-life-that-old-grief>.
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