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If You Don’t Suffer in Life You Can’t Grow.
An easy life is not a gift.
It’s a spiritual truism that suffering is a great teacher. But it feels horrible when one is experiencing it. No one wants it when it happens. We want the pain to stop right now. But the pain is what wakes you up.
The great novelist Henry James illustrates this truth in his classic novel The Portrait of a Lady. The novel’s heroine, Isabel Archer, a young American woman living in late nineteenth-century England, is hungry for experience. She marries an aristocratic bounder named Gilbert Osmond. She gets so much more than she bargained for. He gaslights her, he dominates her, and laughs at her for wanting human dignity. I won’t give away the ending, but she emerges from her marriage experience a much sadder and wiser woman.
Isabel muses on the importance of suffering and seems uncannily drawn to it. She has had an easy life and must make up for this by enduring some kind of hard experience. She seems to understand the necessity of suffering intellectually, but not in the hard-won way of emotional engagement within a real, lived experience:
It had been a very happy life and she had been a very fortunate person — this was the truth that seemed to emerge most vividly. She had had the best of everything, and in a world in which the circumstances of so…
