The desire beneath pain, in C.S. Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress

I've not known nearly as much pain as many others have, though there are griefs that still weigh heavily on the chest on long quiet nights. What I write today is not meant to heal anyone's pain completely, or even substantially. The process of bearing is hard enough, let alone the process of healing. But I write this to reflect on the meaning of pain, first to help myself make sense of it, and second, hopefully, to offer you some comfort as I do—especially at a time when I know many are aching from the weight of a pandemic that has not lifted for a year, and injustices that have not lifted for ages.

C.S. Lewis has written quite a lot on pain. Of his books, I've most recently finished The Pilgrim's Regress, which is an allegorical novel recounting Lewis's own journey in figuring out the meaning of life and joy and pain, and everything. 

At one point, the main character John (representing Lewis) is walking with a Guide. We're not told much about who the Guide is, but he is from the "Mountain people", a different kind from John—an angel, if you will. This Guide is very familiar with the land and with history, and John asks him about the point of pain and suffering in the world.

'"I can answer that only by hearsay," returned the Guide, "for pain is a secret which he has shared with your race and not with mine; and you would find it as hard to explain suffering to me as I should find it to reveal to you the secrets of the Mountain people. But those who know best say this, that any liberal man would choose the pain of this desire, even for ever, rather than the peace of feeling it no longer: and that though the best thing is to have, the next best is to want, and the worst of all is not to want."

"I see that," said John. "Even the wanting, though it is pain too, is more precious than anything else we experience."' (The Pilgrim's Regress)

The Guide suggests he can't quite answer the question, because he doesn't feel pain himself. That comes as a very odd idea because all along the Guide has been speaking and walking and thinking as a human being does. To think that he does not feel pain—and cannot even learn sufficiently about pain from human accounts, since one must feel pain to know it—is odd. But Lewis's point was to turn the lens onto pain itself first of all, rather than to insistently search for an end beyond it. And having turned the lens onto pain, he suggests that there is something about it we've taken for granted—an unlikely preciousness about it.

Preceding pain, lingering beneath pain, and sustaining pain, is a desire for something better, and that desire is precious. Something we desire is something better that we have imagined. And the joy of that imagining! What a great thing it is to be able to imagine and value something better than what this world offers: to be grieved at an untimely death because we love and desire life and the proximity of a beloved; to be frustrated at a pandemic because we value wellness and physical company; to be afflicted at anxiety that won't go away because we value peace and agency.

The pain we feel as human beings isn't just a reflexive cowering from a boiling kettle. It is deeper felt sense that things fall short. Fall short of what? Of the true measure of goodness and beauty that the world should meet. It is a gift in itself that we are born able to see—even without knowing how to reason—that there is a better way that the world should be. The vision of such a better way has been hardwired into us. We are born with hearts that can somehow compute this: that the equations in the world seldom add up. To use a different image, we are born with a strange ability to see outlines of a mountain, though faint, in the background—even as (and even more so when) the valley suffocates us. 

For me it is comforting to ponder this—to wonder at the meaning of this sight, and the meaning of having such an able heart. Pain exists because it contemplates the possibility and plausibility of beauty and peace and better outcomes. Even when the sting is at its most existentially discomposing, it is not pointless if there actually is a way to those better things. Pain may be an inbuilt compass. It may point in the direction of honey away from the river of bitter water. It may point in the direction of the oasis from the parched desert. If this is the case, then pain bids us to look beyond—to contemplate that faraway view which makes the present valley seem so low. What is that view that drives pain so deep—the beauty that hurts because it is far away? Is the beauty an illusion, or can it be real? 

John in The Pilgrim's Regress decided the sight of beauty was real. At the end of his journey, he did reach what he had seen—a beautiful mountainous land beyond the brook, to which the world he lived in did not measure up. And the desire beneath his pain had driven him to it—the tearful imagining of a more beautiful reality—and his consequent pursuit of it. To have wanted it, in his pain—to have seen the faraway beauty—was better than to have not had this want at all. Without such a want—without such pain—he would have lived and died in a low valley where the air was always still and the horizon always empty. But he saw the land beyond, and by a work of grace, the painful distance did finally close. 

Revelation 21:4 "He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."