The human soul is so inevitably the victim of pain that is suffers the pain of the painful surprise even with things it should have expected. A man who has always spoken of fickleness and unfaithfulness as perfectly normal behaviour in women will feel all the devastation of the sad surprise when he discovers that his sweetheart has been cheating on him, exactly as if he’d always held up female fidelity and constancy as a dogma or a rightful expectation. Another man, convinced that everything is hollow and empty, will feel like he’s been struck by lightning when he learns that what he writes is considered worthless, or that his efforts to educate people are in vain, or that it’s impossible to communicate his emotion.

We need not suppose that those who have experienced these and similar disasters were insincere in what they said or wrote, even if the disasters they suffered were foreseeable in their words. The sincerity of intellectual affirmation has nothing to do with the naturalness of spontaneous emotion. Strangely or not, it seems the soul may be given such surprises merely so that it won’t lack pain, so that it will still know disgrace, so that it will have its fair share of grief in life. We are all equal in our capacity for error and suffering. Only those who don’t feel don’t experience pain; and the highest, most notable and most prudent men are those who experience and suffer precisely what they foresaw and what they disdained. This is what is known as Life.