The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa

The second step for the dreamer should therefore be to avoid pain. He shouldn’t avoid it like the Stoics or the early Epicureans, by abandoning the nest, for that will harden him against pleasure as well as against pain. He should, instead, seek pleasure in pain, and then learn how to feel pain falsely – to feel some kind of pleasure, that is, whenever he feels pain. There are various paths for reaching this goal. One is to hyperanalyse our pain (but only after we’ve first trained ourselves to react to pleasure by exclusively feeling it, with no analysis). This is an easier technique than it seems, at least for superior souls. To analyse pain and to get in the habit of submitting all pains to analysis, until we do it automatically, by instinct, will endow every pain imaginable with the pleasure of analysing it. Once our ability and instinct to analyse grow large enough, our practice of it will absorb everything, and there will be nothing left of pain but an indefinite substance for analysis.