Feel the burn

Jenny Diski

• Pain: The Science of Suffering by Patrick Wall
  Weidenfeld, 186 pp, £12.99, July 1999, ISBN 0 297 84255 2

You may have missed out on love, transcendental oneness with the Universe, the adrenaline rush of the warrior, but you’ve had a headache or a bad back. Pain is the one engulfing, undeniable, incommunicable experience we’ve all had. And yet for all its ubiquity, pain is a solitary encounter, a lonely way of discovering the certainty that you exist. I hurt therefore I am is rapidly followed by I hurt therefore I am alone. Two people in pain are not nearly as likely to commit themselves to each other for life, or found a religious community, or become comrades in battle as they are to curl up silently in separate corners of the room to suffer alone what can’t be shared. Nasty business. One of the nastiest we can think of. Fear of death in a secular society is largely fear of pain. It’s not hard to imagine longing for death as a release from pain, but very difficult to believe one would wish to trade the blankness of death for living agony. Even self-confessed masochists are clear that the pain they want is the pain of their choosing, at the time of their choosing and with the sadist of their choosing, not an attack of toothache or appendicitis.