The world according to suffering

Abstract

The experience of suffering can take many forms. Consider the following fragment of Andrew Solomon’s description of his major depression: I felt that my mind was immured, that it couldn’t expand in any direction. I knew that the sun was rising and setting, but little of its light reached me. I felt myself sagging under what was much stronger than I ... In depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all. (Solomon 2001, 18, 29)