The Location Of Suffering


I had a rather curious string of experiences yesterday evening. One of my professors Dr Joachim Rosenthal was releasing his second book The Location of Suffering (Kalamazoo, 2005) at the Cambridge University Centre, and though I was feeling a bit sleepy I decided to go along since I had already paid 15 pounds for the ceremony. There was a huge gathering in the auditorium flush with yellow lights, most of them seemed to be students but there were also a few much older people. Dr Rosenthal welcomed everyone and enthusiastically started talking about some of the important themes of his book. He argued that 'suffering' cannot be located anywhere precisely because it cannot be specified, described, or pinned down to one set of experiences. Indeed, using a suggestive metaphor, he said that trying to define the term 'suffering' was like attempting to catch a slippery eel with hands covered with soap. He concluded by saying that his book should rather have been titled The Dis-locations of Suffering, but that it had already been sent to the press when he had arrived at this realisation.

I came out of the meeting feeling a bit dazed with Dr Rosenthal's brilliant dissection of suffering and his mesmerising use of a detailed conceptual vocabulary that he had invented for the purpose of his book. As I was about to turn towards Trinity, I saw an old man with his black dog sitting down under an oak tree just beside the river Cam, and as I approached him I saw that he was gathering some bits and pieces of wood from the damp grass. He collected all of them into one heap, lit them up with a matchstick, and sat down beside the fire along with his faintly whimpering dog. Seeing me standing and staring at him, he beckoned to me to come closer to him and sit down alongside him. As I sat there in the rapidly falling dusk, I saw him looking at the black hard-bound book in my hand.

'You want to read my book?'

He gently shook his head.

'You want to take my book?'

He shook his head again.

'You want to burn my book?', I asked him, though I do not really know what made me ask him that question.

His eyes suddenly flashed in the evening darkness, a smile came over his faint lips, and he peered at me for a long moment. Then he hungrily seized the book from me, tore off the cover, and threw it into the fire. I watched, paralysed to the bone : that book had cost me 35 pounds and would not be available in the Library for at least another five months. He did not stop, however, and frantically went on tearing off the pages and casting them into the luminous heap of paper and wood.

Behind me, the dog was wagging its tail wildly and in the skies above, a few snow-flakes were drifting in the cold air. It was only then that I finally realised why suffering cannot be located : it is both everywhere and nowhere, it is a bundle of paradoxes, it is infinitely beyond us and is yet present to us intimately as the most tangible reality, we desperately wish to run away from it and yet are somehow afraid to lose its strange warmth.

The old man was now rubbing his hands in glee, and his face was shining as brightly as the crackling mass. I looked once again into his dark eyes. There the sigh of my disinherited Mind had finally become one with the lament of his dispossessed World.