[lit-ideas] Re: War, no sort of about it

  • From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 15:33:01 -0400

Andy the A: Basically you're saying there is no such thing as pain. You're saying pain is in the mind of the beholder.

Eric: No, just that the way our imagination builds up fear of pain is much more impressive than the pain itself.

When I was a child, I was walking in my father's lumberyard and stepped on a nail that went through my foot, came out the other side. There was nobody around but me and I had to pull it out and hobble back to my house. It is much more painful to pull a nail out of one's foot than it is to have the nail in one's foot.

It gave me a great story to tell. The actual pain was much more short-lived than my future precautions against stepping on nails, or my imaginations of what bullets and arrows feel like.

Fear of harm, the imagination of pain, are much stronger than the thing itself. Again, I was only averring that the horror of the world is on our eyes, is a form of our desire to avoid pain.

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