For a time I slept with a Protestant, who in his turn designed motorways, and he told me, probably quoting Luther, that he who suffers sees the back of God. I wondered if this meant the shoulders, or the buttocks perhaps, and what this divine back looks like, since we’re incapable of imagining the front. Maybe it means that he who suffers has special access to God, by a side door, he is blessed, he embraces some sort of truth which without suffering would be hard to comprehend. So in a way, the only person who’s healthy is one who suffers, however strange it might sound. I think that would be
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