On Pain

Today for St. Andrew and I emerge from most of six weeks of pain, Deo gratias.

The pain is rheumatism, in the foot, which has made walking to feel as if it were on raw bone. A step requires the unwelcome calculation of necessity and desire against pain. The liver grows accustomed (or not) to overdoses of Diclofenac. Malawi gin is too easy a recourse.

I recall this pain first from long ago, when, as an undergraduate, I would undertake ‘January walks’, undeterred, in my exaltation, by Isis in flood. I suspect, more generally, that rheumatism is a turning against itself of the body, akin to the eczema which would prove, in due course, my undoing at Oxford. The immediate cause is all but ridiculous. I drove a hire car, a little Renault, from George to Cape St. Francis: not along the coast but up and over the Outeniqua Pass and through the Karoo – a wonderful journey, but alas, I should have worn better shoes to work the manual transmission.

What does pain teach? Humility, I suppose, but in a roundabout way. It is difficult to conceive too elevated a view of oneself when one is made tetchy by the slightest upset. Does not Simone Weil, among the greatest souls of the twentieth century, comment somewhere that, amidst a migraine, she could not help but wish her exact same pain on another?

These rheumatic pains are now chronic, so there will be a great deal more humility to learn, but in the meantime, respite is a blessing.