For Bill, who proposed the idea, and Simba, who asked specifically…
I.
One of the fundamental perplexities of life is that joy and pain have such an intimate kinship with each other. On the surface, it would seem that their paths operate as strict geometric parallels, stretching out into infinity without ever meeting. Yet there is always a point at which the lines are redrawn just prior to some unforeseen railroad-like switch, where we discover that we have travelled onto the opposite path, and it is at that point in which we must either immerse ourselves within joy or somehow endure the pain until we encounter another switch that puts us back on the other side.
The consolation when confronted with pain is that nothing lasts forever, be it through analgesic, better fortune or death. The converse principle on the smiling obverse of that coin is that joy, like pain, doesn’t last forever either, be it through injury, worse fortune or death. The hard reality for the living is that change and time supply the music in our dance through life, and when they unite in silence is at our final change of state, when time as we know it in this existence runs out, and we meet death. Some might argue that the dead have it easier. However, if you’re averse to the mere concept of permanent stasis, bear in mind that the dead have left this life, a life that is fundamentally composed of alternating currents of joy and pain. You could just as easily intuit that because they know no pain, they know no joy, either, which just might mean that Heaven is a very boring place indeed.
There seem to be many more words available to describe pain than there are to describe joy, perhaps because when we are experiencing joy, we have little instinctive desire to document it (save through the modern phenomenon of photography that provides its own one thousand-word description, but that, too, can fall by the wayside). We tend to do whatever is necessary within that moment to savor it and perhaps prolong it.
Joy is most often derived from a shared experience. If you were to honestly consider all the best moments of your life, there was most likely at least one other person with you at those moments of unmitigated elation, and unless you are the rare, ever-categorizing sort, you most likely didn’t interrupt the shared moment to quantify and qualify it while in the rapturous company of others. We are at our very core social creatures who extract so much from our experiences through others. If you doubt that, you should reconsider the fear of being alone, for it is a force of nature that should never be underestimated.
Pain, however, is part of that long dark night of the soul, which is most likely why we have so many more words for it. We have a need to document it in order to understand it, alleviate it and hopefully avoid it in the future. There are words that try to identify with another’s pain, such as sympathy, empathy and apathy, all derived from the Ancient Greek word pathos (πάθος) meaning “suffering.” When we are sympathetic (sym- meaning with), we try to duplicate another’s suffering without necessarily having a frame of reference for it; when we are empathetic (em- meaning in), we try to relate to a similar moment in our lives when we experienced similar suffering; and when we are apathetic (a- meaning without), we are so numbed so as to be removed from feeling anything. All of these are sharp vocalizations of the inherent truth of the situation, which is that pain is always unique and cannot ever be experienced in the same way or at the same time by two different and discrete people. There’s the chance that we might bond with someone who is living through a similar brand of pain and derive some small consolation (joy?) from that palsied connection, but it’s woefully misguided to assume that there is perhaps some comparative measure for another’s pain, adding further isolation to the experience. Pain is intrinsically lonely, regardless of how much we might try to help another through it, and although each experience is unique, we approximate it somehow through the vocabulary afforded us that describes pain.
II.
Two words come to mind when describing extreme sensations of pain: agony and anguish. Strangely enough, one of these words is encoded with hope.
Anguish comes from the Latin noun angustia, meaning “difficulties, trials.” This connotation serves as an abstraction for its alternate definition of “narrowness,” and it in turn came from the adjective angustus which specifically meant “narrow” or “not spacious.” When we think of anguish, we’re propelled into the loftier hells of the mind, for it is divorced from physicality. If it does have any physicality, anguish comes with imagery of the hands-wringing intellectual contemplation of the unpredictability of a situation. It is descriptive of the limitations caused by pain and subsequently over any control we might have upon it. Will this pain, these difficulties, this claustrophobic state last until the end of my life? If so, how much more pain must I endure? And if not, how long until the hurt is gone? The answer is never immediately available, which is the root of anguish, the myopic perspective of being unable to perceive the temporary nature of pain.
Agony arrived in Britain via Ancient Greece from the words agonia (ἀγωνία), meaning “emulation, competition, struggle” and agon (ἀγών), “contest.” The word stems from conditions that are inherently physical, and when we are suffering through immeasurable physical pain, we are said to be in agony. Agony, however, is often associated with a strictly metaphysical context, for it is used within Christianity to describe Christ’s inner torment in the Garden of Gethsemane. When faced with his own impending death and ultimate self-sacrifice, Christ’s confrontation with his internal fear is considered agony.
One could say that there are two wrestling matches with angels demonstrating a more literal context of agony within the Bible: the first is the physical struggle between Jacob and the angel within the Book of Genesis, and the second the more metaphysical event of Christ wrestling a figurative Angel of Doubt while in the Garden as recounted in the Gospels. Both are contests from which a victor is meant to rise above the fray. Just as with any life or death struggle that any of us encounter, whether it manifests physically or otherwise, our survival instinct motivates us to vanquish our opponent. (It’s rare that such pervasive despair would grip someone within the throes of such a struggle, causing them to seek defeat and death.) It is in this relentless pursuit of victory that we discover the deeply hidden sea of hope within the word agony. The triumph over an opponent and liberation from pain are rewards within themselves, and on the other side of successfully enduring agony is the promise of joy that demonstrates our strength, our resolve, our victory. Outlasting agony is joy in itself.
III.
Not that this is wisdom that comes easily. Most often, it’s when we survive a brush with death that we appreciate life most, and similarly it’s through triumphing over pain that we are able to cherish joy within the moment for all its subtleties. It’s not always the case, though, for as we make our way through this world, we acquire aching wounds that use their power to spin the coin of life along its edge, leaving us hanging in the balance while we wait for the coin to settle on the stoic resolve of one side or the beaming laughter of the other. It’s in this uncertain state, the only true state there is, that we appreciate that all those lines that separate joy and pain are irrevocably blurred, and their seemingly parallel paths are illusory at their worst and a matter of perspective at best. In the ideal, the removal of pain results in joy and vice versa. But life rarely allows such purity, which clues us in to a profound esoteric knowledge that joy and pain are most likely expressions of the same great thing, and they come from some mysterious place that we mortals cannot know, where the gods and the dead sing in praise of the grand purpose behind enduring pain and cherishing joy.
Nevertheless, we the living arrive at the same question over and over again: it is worth it, this agonizing struggle, this anguished moment?
Only time will tell.
