Saturday, January 11, 2003

It's like "The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys" in here.

To provide a clarification: this is not an "online journal". It is a concatenation of narrated events and pontifications, some or none of which may be true. So, moving on:

"We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the 'unimaginable sum of human misery'. Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that no one is suffering 2x: search all time and space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone's consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain"

--C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

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