Episode 4: Suffering

Darcey Steinke’s engrossing new book explores the subject of pain – what science tells us and what artists and thinkers have made of it. For Steinke, it all started when she damaged her back. As the process of healing began, she began to look outwards, to explore what it is like for others to live with chronic pain. With a new understanding, she reflects on the lives of writers and artists who have found meaning in the experience of pain.

In this fourth episode, she reflects on the concept of suffering and whether anything positive can come from it:
‘During the worst days of my suffering from my spinal injury, when friends came over, I was alienated from their discussions of tarot cards and risotto recipes. Pain had limited my mobility and made it hard to think, but it was the accompanying mental suffering that most isolated me. I felt as if well-meaning humans had come to visit a wounded, irritable bear. Advice to surf my suffering was incomprehensible to me, no matter how many Buddhist self-help books I read. The quotes about using my suffering for self-discovery seemed bogus to me, even cruel.’

Thinking further about suffering, Steinke explores the lives of the French philosopher Simone Weill and of Franz Kafka, and describes her meetings with the musician Kurt Cobain.

The reader is award-winning actor Elizabeth McGovern, who played the Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey

Adapted and produced by Elizabeth Burke
Executive producer: Sara Davies
Sound design: Jon Calver
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4