ON THE PROBLEM OF PAIN AND ITS SOLUTION

In this post, I'll explore a passage from Mrs. Gatty's parable "The Voices of the Earth", in which a surly wind complains to the element Earth about all the fuss that we humans make:
"Not the breath of the dying only overwhelms me with this wild desire to be at rest. The breath of the living who suffer on is even worse. The sigh of natural grief, which none can blame; the moanings of the afflicted in mind, body, or estate; the outcries of the oppressed and desperate; the shrieks of madness and of pain, the groanings of despair; all, all are outpoured on me! Those dreadful voices haunt me from all sides. This mass of human woe corrodes my soul. I meet it in the cottage, and pass through to find it in the palace; I rush from the battlefield to the cloister, but in vain! for no seclusion can shut out man (or woman, for that matter, not to sound as "sexist" as the female author!) from sorrow."

Grief. Disease. Oppression. Pain. Despair. Things that we humans can not accept at all.

The Earth replies: "What, if amidst the mortal agony of the righteous, the triumph-songs of faith grow loud, wouldst thou not fear to take away the one, lest the other perchance should fail from off the earth?"

 Then, she proposes optimism as an antidote to the problem of pain: "The peaceful respirations of health, unnoticed and, alas! how often unthankfully enjoyed through years, count them if thou canst! Count them as they float to thee, while the night hours pass over the sleeper's head: count them when he wakes with the young daylight to a fresh existence. Count the laughs of frolic childhood. Count the murmurs of happy love. Count the stars if thou wilt (this immediately calls to mind the star-counting capitalist in Saint-Exupery's famous novel!), but thou canst never count the daily outpourings of common earthly joys. Alas for those who judge of life only by startling periods, and are deaf to the still small voices, which tell of hourly mercies, hour by hour!" 

Pollyanna, as she appeared in the anime series of my childhood.

In astrology, the element Air symbolizes thought and reason, while Earth stands for realism and sensory perception. I am an Aquarius with ascendant Virgo: an Air person within, an Earth person without. So the problem of pain alternates in my mindset with the  age-old motto "carpe diem" (or "hakuna matata"), and I display a sanguine temperament and optimistic outlook, like Pollyanna's, most of the time, but I still wonder if there is a dark side to reality. 

Gottfried von Leibniz: orphan of war, child prodigy, courtier, mathematician, computer science pioneer, and Enlightened philosopher. 

Gottfried von Leibniz, a Baroque-era courtier, mathematician, and philosopher, clearly told physical evil (pain, death, grief, the blues, violent deaths caused by accidents and natural disaster), founded on the laws of nature; from moral evil (oppression, warfare, persecution, murders...), caused by humans' wrong use of their free will.  Leibniz, born in Leipzig in 1646, lost both his parents to the Thirty Years' War, and he had to study pretty hard for getting the Law degree he wanted. Yet he entered the local university (had I ever told you that Leipzig has been "the Oxford of the Continent" for decades?) in his early teens, and then served at several electoral courts, before appearing in the entourage of Kaiser Charles VI himself.  He is also considered "the father of calculus", id est, he discovered the derivatives and functions that made me pass Maths. To crown the list of his achievements, Leibniz created the binary system: the zeroes and ones that make up every single word or picture in this blog (or any other site in the Net), and the cornerstone of our modern Information Age (whether social networks or space explorations)!

 Perchance his justified success story is the reason why he said that "we live in the best of all possible worlds".