On Jung, Dostoevsky, And Suffering
happiness is itself poisoned if the measure of suffering has not been fulfilled
Writing about suffering is uncomfortable.
Writing about suffering because you wanted to, not because it was a college assignment your professor gave, from the comfort of your desk chair and laptop almost feels blasphemous.
I mean, who can translate the pain of lived suffering onto text?
But the universal truth is if you are a human, and you have lived, you have suffered. And if you are a human, and you have lived, you have thought about the problem of suffering.
And thinking and writing are almost indistinct.
Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky, one of the most brilliant writers in history, never tip-toed around the problem of pain and suffering. His complex, human characters are all confronted with the larger than life issue. In Notes from the Underground, for example, the narrator says
“everything is a mess in which it is impossible to tell what’s what, but despite this impossibility and this deception it still hurts you, and the less you understand, the more it hurts, “
Dostoevsky was sceptical to the idea achieving happiness is through the evasion of suffering…
