So what do we do with the pain of living? Many people who have questioned religion have rejected the religious advice that one should just accept and be reconciled with suffering. Secular thinkers have pointedly accused religion of being a cult of pain. Judaism became a new kind of religion during the Babylonian captivity when the Israelites in their sorrow began blaming themselves instead of their God for their misfortune. When the Jews met with adversity again throughout history, often they blamed themselves and tried to make amends with God. The Buddhist way of embracing suffering is very different, and yet arrives at a similar conclusion: a measure of self-denial will lead to more happiness. From the outside both these religions have seemed, to some observers, to be too resigned to suffering.
Early Christianity took the idea of embracing suffering to new extremes. Consider Jesus’ acceptance of torture at the hands of the soldiers, then consider the flagellants—medieval monks who thrashed themselves bloody—and consider the hundreds of thousands on barefoot treks for religious pilgrimages. In May 2010 Pope Benedict told a crowd of followers in Portugal that the infirm must “overcome the feeling of the uselessness of suffering which consumes a person from within and makes him feel a burden to those around him when, in reality, suffering which is lived with Jesus assists in the salvation of your brethren.” For the religious, suffering can have great value. Secularists in all times reject religion for its praise of suffering, which seems cruel in a world already so full of pain.
Still, secular culture desperately needs some way of valuing suffering. Life has suffering in it no matter what you do; no one escapes. As we have seen, there is a secular tradition that honors the hurt we have had in our lives, without suggesting that we invite more.
The poet John Keats wrote that the world is a “vale of soul-making,” explaining that we become something greater than ourselves if we live through difficulties.
I will put it in the most homely form possible—I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read—I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School—and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul! A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, It is the Mind’s Bible, it is the Mind’s experience, it is the teat from which the mind or intelligence sucks its identity.1
Keats saw the terrible pain of life as necessary to the development of a full human being. While the heart suffers acutely, the mind is nurtured and matured through the information garnered by the anguished heart. In his extended metaphor there is no other way for a human being to be tempered into personhood. In that sense the world, with all its difficulties, is a school. As we saw, Montaigne, too, believed that suffering brought one to a greater experience of life, and Schopenhauer taught that through the process of life and its anguish one attains a better vantage point from which to know the world.
In modern secular culture the phrase “no pain, no gain” is generally heard only in conjunction with physical exercise and sport, but the expression might be rehabilitated to describe the challenge of attaining not a gym body but rather emotional and intellectual maturity. We need to recapture some of the philosophical stance toward suffering, not only because pain can have value but because it is cruel to let people feel they are suffering needlessly when in fact they might be gaining wisdom. In psychotherapy especially, the pain of living can lead to solace and freedom. Childhood formed us all, and the more we suffered then, the harder it can be to accept ourselves as adults. True, the road to self-awareness is arduous. Some realizations bring us to low feelings much like grief, and much like grief the only solution is to live through it. We come out wiser on the other side. As Robert Frost wrote, “The only way around is through.”
Nietzsche provides important insight into the profound importance of suffering. In The Gay Science he writes of how difficult it is to know one another’s suffering and of the attempts we make, out of pity, to console one another:
It is the very essence of the emotion of pity that it strips away from the suffering of others whatever is distinctively personal. … The whole economy of my soul and the balance effected by “distress,” the way new springs and needs break open, the way in which old wounds are healing, the way whole periods of the past are shed—all such things that may be involved in distress are of no concern to our dear pitying friends; they wish to help and have no thought of the personal necessity of distress, although terrors, deprivations, impoverishments, midnights, adventures, risks, and blunders are as necessary for me and for you as are their opposites. It never occurs to them that, to put it mystically, the path to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell. No, the “religion of pity” … commands them to help, and they believe that they have helped most when they have helped most quickly.
Nietzsche compels his readers to examine their own attitudes and see whether they too do everything in their power to expunge suffering from their experience. He warns us that the common refusal to tolerate suffering even an hour signals an unproductive devotion to the “religion of comfortableness.”
For Nietzsche, the common idea that displeasure is a defect of existence disguises the truth that pain is inherent in existence and part of our path toward wisdom. Comfort, he writes, is in opposition to real happiness. Happiness and unhappiness, he explains, “are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or … remain small together.”2
Nietzsche urges us to see that human suffering is necessary, but what is not necessary is painfully regretting that suffering. Our condition hands us difficulty, and unless we are careful to stop ourselves, we add more difficulty to our lot by fearing and loathing that difficulty. We suffer and then hate ourselves for suffering. We are much better off accepting the pain, seeing it as universal, noting that it can be borne, and, when possible, expressing it.3
Pain is rarely praised these days. Yet some still engage with the idea that crucial kinds of growth are achieved through suffering. Author Calvin Trillin writes that his late wife Alice responded to tragedy with rare insight. She wrote to a young woman who had been violently attacked, saying that no one would ever choose to be throttled by life: “But you don’t get to choose, and it is possible at least to … begin to understand the line in ‘King Lear’—‘Ripeness is all.’ You might have chosen to become ripe less dramatically or dangerously, but you can still savor ripeness.”4 Living through anguish can give a person uncommon depth. Today we often refuse to “listen to suffering”—we pretend it is noise with no content and try only to get rid of it. We might consider listening to it. Especially for those who are suicidal, whose suffering is so intense that they cannot hear clearly what it is saying, psychotherapy can help.
Another way of listening to pain is to listen to others’ stories of pain and survival. Consider Erica Jong’s “Dear Colette,” an epistolary poem addressed to the French author of the title, thanking her for being a strong woman writer. Colette’s books meant so much to Jong that for decades the poet has hung a picture of the French author above her desk. So many female writers, Jong observes, were either suicides or “spinsters,” but Colette was neither. In the poem, Jong cites the unmarried Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath gassing herself in the oven, and Virginia Woolf drowning herself, among others. She thanks Colette for marrying, for having a complicated love life, for having a child, for singing and dancing and always still writing. She thanks Colette for enduring, for having “never willingly let go,” and concludes by saying that Colette’s example has held her to this life, which, we can fairly deduce, she hopes will be an example for her own readers.5
Such connections are exceedingly important. We feel our suffering in isolation. But suffering may also unite us if we make that communal suffering visible to ourselves. The social idea to take one’s own life, within the context of a deeply enmeshed society, may have a direct mirror in a social idea to preserve yourself for the sake of others, within the context of a society like ours, marked by independence. In the Great Depression of the 1930s many individuals took their lives, either when they lost all their money in the stock market crash or during the period afterward, with its grinding unemployment. When we think of it now it seems surprising that people could take these widespread hardships so personally, but this seems to be how the mind works—all misfortune feels local. In any era, recognizing that many people are in pain may help individuals to live through their own worst times. Collective suffering is a powerful notion because it can help convince people that they are not to blame for their suffering and because it can add a sense of companionship to life. The idea of collective suffering can also bolster the idea of collectively rejecting suicide.
Throughout history, some traditions and prejudices of a given culture that have long been assumed to be good or neutral—foot binding, or dueling, slavery or repressing homosexuals—have been flipped in a generation or two, so that the good migrates to the other side. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Honor Code shows that a culture’s shifting sense of what is honorable is more efficacious than top-down legislation in changing behavior. The notion of what is honorable is resilient, but it can evolve.6 Appiah points to so-called “honor killings” in the Muslim world as a tradition that might also respond to the same kind of social awareness and thus become increasingly rare. Perhaps if we pay attention to Kant, Schopenhauer, and other voices advocating that we live through the pain, surviving a suicidal impulse could be added to this list of the honorable.
Appiah cites Kant’s declaration, in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, that the highest reason for doing good is not “inclination towards honor” but acting in order to do the right thing, which Kant calls acting from duty. “But Kant himself says we should ‘praise and encourage’ righteous acts motivated by honor. That seems only sensible. After all, if people find it hard (as they evidently do) to act from duty, we have cause to make sure they have other reasons for doing what is right.”7 Why not adapt the call of Kant and Appiah to include praise and encouragement for those who are tempted by suicide and yet reject it?
It is an intellectual and moral mistake to see the idea of suicide as an open choice that each of us is free to make. The arguments against suicide ask us to commit ourselves to the human project. They ask humanity to set down its daggers and cups of hemlock and walk away from them forever. Let us be done with bare bodkins.
If we take seriously the arguments against suicide that we have rehearsed in the course of these pages, it seems right to ask each other to survive, to stay on this side of the guardrail. The suicidal should be aware that they are doing something noble when they make a cup of tea and stare at the sky through the branches. If we take seriously the arguments against suicide, we have to ask the suicidal person to see herself as a Lucretia who survives.
Suffering and surviving are ways of serving humanity, and that, in and of itself, can bring some happiness. The twentieth-century humanitarian Albert Schweitzer spoke poignantly on the subject. Addressing a group of school boys, Schweitzer said that he sometimes got letters asking him how to live.
And when I answer such letters I add … “Seek a humble sort of thing.” Our hearts often look for something very big, something wanting a lot of sacrifice, and often our heart does not see the humble things. At first you must learn to do the humble things and often they are the most difficult to do. In those humble things, be busy about helping someone who has need of you. You see somebody alone—try and be with him, try to give him some of the hours which you might take for yourself and in that way learn to serve: and then only will you begin to find true happiness. I don’t know what your destiny will be. Some of you will perhaps occupy remarkable positions. Perhaps some of you will become famous by your pens, or as artists. But I know one thing: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.
As Eleanor Roosevelt put it, “In all our contacts it is probably the sense of being really needed and wanted which gives us the greatest satisfaction and creates the most lasting bond.” At the end of his Conquest of Happiness, the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote, “The whole antithesis between self and the rest of the world, which is implied in the doctrine of self-denial, disappears as soon as we have any genuine interest in persons or things outside ourselves. Through such interests a man comes to feel himself part of the stream of life.” Maybe the service one does for others and for oneself in staying alive through suicidal times is sufficient to garner some of these positive feelings.8
A person in crisis may find it too hard to do anything for himself, let alone for someone else. In crisis it may be too hard to think. Yet it may be possible to think through these ideas ahead of time, so that useful responses are at the ready when one needs them. One needs to practice believing in the power of small actions to change the way one feels. In an acute state of misery, it may be impossible to initiate this kind of belief: one tries to imagine connecting with others and gets nowhere. Just as we cannot get drunk by thinking about vodka, we cannot feel the good feelings that come with being connected with people by thinking about connecting. We have to act, and then be aware of how acting changes our outlook, and vigilantly remember the experience. If we have done the work of thinking about these things in advance of our dark times, they may become accessible to us when we need them to help carry us through to better days. When we think of being of use, we should start small, thinking first of our past service and how we honor that by simply staying alive. We may also think of the service we can do for people by honestly bearing witness to our own pain, in writing or in conversation. There is also the small yet meaningful service of asking people in our lives about their feelings and listening with patience and understanding. There are small acts of service that we can do in response to need, without necessarily committing ourselves to long-term activities. Many people who do a great deal of service describe starting small and following the good feelings that these first small actions bring them, then slowly increasing the commitments, which bring them ever more peace of mind. We should not be unduly optimistic about this, but neither should we be unduly pessimistic. We can take seriously the fact that severe misery sometimes befalls us and that when severe misery strikes, very little is possible, yet we can practice being aware that if we can hold out for them, better days will come.
There are two people who committed suicide whom I want to quote on the pain of life. The first is David Foster Wallace, in a passage in which he brings to vivid attention the agony of tedium:
Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor you have made, heroism. Heroism. … The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all—all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience. … Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality—there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth—actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.9
One of the beautiful things about this piece of writing is that it concentrates on the trials of ordinary life. We often associate pain in life with either horrendous misfortune or terrible mental health disorder, like hospitalized depression. Many times, however, people feel extreme despair while they continue to function in everyday life. Wallace here reminds his reader that it is legitimate to feel that despair, and likewise it is legitimate to recognize the heroism of continuing on. The notion goes well with Camus’s idea of the absurd. We did not make this world, Wallace’s speaker says, and our childhood inclinations about how to succeed in it turn out to be wrong: often our courage is needed not to dramatically change reality but to accept it and persist in it. Camus advises us to cope with this strange reality by concentrating our attention on the strangeness of it; not by making sense of it, but by aligning ourselves with the absence of sense. Camus’s idea of the absurd is not a doctrine that counsels us to do service for others, but Camus’s own act of writing his ideas and giving them to the world was itself an act of service. If we think about writing and publishing for the sake of self-aggrandizement, we will probably be disappointed—as we can see from the many stories of successful people who report misery or even kill themselves, success does not always feed the hunger as we think it will. If instead we think of the community of sufferers and understand our writing as a way of connecting to them, we may well feel better ourselves. We can write about loneliness without noticing that our readers make us part of a community, but if we do the work of noticing this and remembering it, it can save our lives.
The second person who committed suicide from whom I want to offer a quotation, on the pain of life, is the poet Anne Sexton:
I don’t want to live. … Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can’t Live It. I can’t even explain. I know how silly it sounds … but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that’s the rub. I am like a stone that lives … locked outside of all that’s real. … I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet … and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can’t, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong … to do it all wrong … believe me, (can you?) … what’s wrong. I want to belong. … I’m not a part. I’m not a member. I’m frozen.10
Sexton’s expression of anguish is extraordinary. Yet such feelings are not uncommon. To live through this painful feeling is hard work and requires prodigious courage. That courage comes first from recognizing that we are not alone. Sexton’s confession here is of feeling cut off from community, yet she expresses something that a huge number of people experience. If we can grasp that commonality, the pain can become easier to bear. The courage to live may also come from having shared with other people, through reading or conversation, that despite pain it is worth finding the courage to live—for the sake of other people and for the sake of our future selves. None of us can save Sexton or Wallace, which is a brutal pity. We might, however, be able save one another and ourselves, in part by becoming more aware of the community and especially of the community of sufferers. It can feel like we are alone, unseen, frozen out, but that is not the case. There is a lot of company on the dark side of life.
In a memorable article in the New Yorker, Tad Friend wrote about the “suicide magnet” quality of the Golden Gate Bridge. Friend advocates that a barrier be erected to prevent the suicides—a measure that has encountered an odd resistance on aesthetic grounds. Those opposing the barrier have argued that people kept from killing themselves on the Golden Gate would simply find someplace else to do it, perhaps in a way dangerous to others. Friend cites a study from 1978 that followed up on 515 people who were stopped from jumping off the bridge between 1937 and 1971. At that point the average time elapsed was more than twenty-six years, yet 94 percent of those who had tried to commit suicide on the bridge were still alive or had died of natural causes.11 He also mentions that several people who have jumped off the bridge and survived reported regretting the decision only moments after having made the leap.
On high precipices where guard rails have been put up, it is possible that the guardrail fence not only physically prevents people from jumping but also reminds them that the community cares and is trying to watch after them. When the kind of English gas ovens that made it so easy for Sylvia Plath to kill herself were replaced, the suicide rate in England went down. When the United Kingdom banned the sale of acetaminophen in bulk, permitting only sales of packets of sixteen pills, there was a marked decrease in the rate of suicides and suicide attempts.12 Surely, if barriers to physical, actual means of suicide can make a difference, then conceptual barriers to the whole idea can also make a difference. Arguments against suicide can provide such a conceptual barrier. We have only to spread the word, make suicide resistance part of our culture, attach a sense of honor to perseverance. The hope is that these ideas can take suicide off of one’s list of options, preempt it as an emotional possibility the way a physical barrier can preempt the physical act of jumping. If we can take suicide off the docket for the moment, that moment may turn out to be enough.
Works that put forth an argument for living might be imagined as notably cheery, but they often come out of a tradition of seeing the harsh side of life. The dark vision of life is also present in heartwarming stories. The quintessential American film about suicide is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Part of what makes the film so compelling is that it argues that life is worth living despite its suffering and darkness. Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey is miserable and frustrated near the beginning of the film. He has sacrificed his big dreams for the sake of his small town and his family. Now his nemesis Henry Potter steals his money, and it seems as if all the sacrificing was in vain. In his desperation, wracked with anguish, George makes his way to a bridge with thoughts of jumping. This is a movie of magic, and an angel, Clarence, is dispatched to help George. Clarence finds him on a bridge on Christmas Eve, thinking about jumping. What Clarence does is to show him how important George has been by giving him a look at what his town would be like if he had never existed. Much that turned out wholesome and good with George’s help turned out seedy and sad without him. When he realizes that he wants to have lived, his world is restored to him and he is grateful, especially as his friends throughout the town and beyond collect money for George to make up for his loss. Despite the movie’s portrait of friendship and generosity, Potter never gives the money back; in fact, his act of thievery is never discovered. By a cruel twist of fate, the money just seems to have vanished. Life is not shown to be very wonderful at all, really. What it is, though, is important. George’s friends and family need him and love him, and that turns out to be the crucial matter. The pain of loss is overpowered by the call back to life.
Many authors have celebrated the sweetness of life, and for those who are feeling good it can be wonderful to read of happiness. Here we have seen that some thinkers in history have written about how difficult life is, but have encouraged us to see that difficulty as a necessary part of the wisdom and joy we may get from life. Such ideas can be companions to us in our darkest times. We are all in this together. The twin insight is that, first, you have a responsibility not to kill yourself; and second, the rest of us—and you yourself—owe you our thanks and respect. We are indebted to one another and the debt is a kind of faith—a beautiful, difficult, strange faith. We believe each other into being.