"'You experienced pain yesterday and you discovered that it led to pleasure. You experienced it today and found peace. That's why I'm telling you: don't get used to it, because it's very easy to become habituated; it's a very powerful drug. It's in our daily lives, in our hidden suffering, in the sacrifices we make, blaming love for the destruction of our dreams. Pain is frightening when it shows its real face, but it's seductive when it comes disguised as sacrifice or self-denial. Or cowardice. However much we may reject it, we human beings always find a way of being with pain, of flirting with it and making it part of our lives.''I don't believe that. No one wants to suffer''If you think you can live without suffering, that's a great step forward, but don't imagine that other people will understand you. True, no one wants to suffer, and yet nearly everyone seeks out pain and sacrifice, and then they feel justified, pure, deserving of the respect of their children, husbands, neighbors, God... ... Does a soldier go to war in order to kill the enemy? No, he goes in order to die for his country. Does a wife want to show her husband how happy she is? No, she wants him to see how devoted she is, how she suffers in order to make him happy."
I wanna copy more! I dunno- maybe it's because I'm detoxing and on this whole personal journey of extremes, but I got into this book. It was sexy and smart! Maybe it's just because I'm not having sex... Anyway! Coehlo is a smart dude and he wrote a book about an intelligent prostitute. It came to me right on time. Not to give it away, but the ending was quite Pretty Woman-ish and so I wouldn't say it was exactly realistic. Still, all in all, it was a good read.
It got me thinking about the relationship between pain and pleasure, this passage especially. Of course there are the obvious cliches: 'No pain, no gain', or 'Pain before pleasure'. The peculiarities of nature. Like tickling. What's the deal with tickling? It's extremely annoying, it hurts, and yet we laugh; the sounds of pleasure cause more tickling. It's not fun for the tickled. And what about how sex in its most rapturing and physically gratifying moments can look and sound agonizing? What does it mean? There are also the famous quotes to consider when approaching this subject, like Aristotle's, "The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain." I even Wikipedia searched Freud's Pleasure Principle concept and was surprised to read that it is something we are expected to mature out of- the desire to achieve pleasure above all other responsibilities. Around what age does this kick in for males?
Side note- if it's true that too much of a good thing is bad, is too much of a bad thing eventually good? From what I can tell from watching a lot of successful Family Guy jokes, sometimes this is true.
On that note and the others I wonder, how can the sex industry be created and succeed off the backs (or on the backs, I should say- snicker, snicker) of pained, damaged women? Even without my obvious and repetitive assumption sneaking in to the argument that strippers have all been sexually abused, isn't it weird to think that these women are pained just being in a stripclub? They all hate it! None of them really want to hang out with these men, and yet those same bored women put on a smile and make men happier than they've ever been. Later the strippers leave happily paid and the men sulk home miserable. Is that a win-win situation or a lose-lose? I mean what's worse, the psychological impoverishment and financial desperation behind stripper motivation or the affection-starved, reality-ignorance of their gluttonous customers? Can we really blame the guy who's 4'3'', the burn victim or excessively sweaty nerd for wanting to be hugged by a chick way out of their league? What about the regular dude who worked his ass off to become filthy rich? Everybody needs to eat and be loved, so who's wrong? Is anybody? Perhaps the strippers and their clients are really peas in a pod...
Which reminds me, a professor of psychology once pointed out that life is not linear and so when two things are considered to be on opposite sides of a spectrum they are instead more likely right next to each other in a three dimensional world. It's not that deep- connect the ends of a line and you've got yourself a circle is all. It was a better analogy in person with the hand gestures, I suppose.
Keeping with the theme- then this other book, Sue Miller's While I Was Gone, added to the discussion in my brain about pain and pleasure. And since I'm already on a roll with the copyright infringement, I'll close with part of a sermon from a character, Daniel, a minister who recently helped to comfort children after the passing of their young mother:
"But pain may be a gift to us. To us, and to that child. Remember, after all, that pain is one of the ways we register in memory the things that vanish, that are taken away. We fix them in our minds forever by yearning, by pain, by crying out. Pain, the pain that seems unbearable at the time, is memory's first imprinting step, the cornerstone of the temple we erect inside us in memory of the dead. Pain is part of memory, and memory is a God-given gift."
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