I Need My PAIN!

On a recent episode of the series Once Upon a Time, Snow White is given a potion that will take away all her memories of love for her Prince.

In the same episode she makes the acquaintance of Grumpy, one of the eight dwarfs (the eighth dwarf is named Stealthy, and he dies in this same episode, because he was apparently not stealthy enough).

Grumpy shares his story of heartache and lost love and Snow asks Grumpy why he would want to keep those memories if he could simply make them go away.

Grumpy replies, “I don’t want my pain erased. As wretched as it is, I need my pain! It makes me who I am. It makes me Grumpy.”

Of course, Grumpy was channeling here the greatest of all philosophers, Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, as quoted in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

Long thought to be the worst of the Star Trek movie series, (and indeed, parts of it are wretched) there are in fact one or two parts of this movie that almost redeem it. (A fan re-edit would be great, hint hint)

After Spock’s brother, Sybok, offers to take away Kirk’s “pain” with some sort of Vulcan hocus pocus, Kirk famously says, “Damn it, Bones, you’re a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can’t be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. They’re the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don’t want my pain taken away! I need my pain!“

This gets right to core of us as people, doesn’t it?

Take away the experiences that hurt us, that toughen and coarsen us, and you take away the parts that make us who we are. I think often of the Eloi, from H.G. Well’s awesome novel The Time Machine.

Innocent little creatures, the Eloi are humanity’s descendants who don’t have the capacity to learn from their pain. They are simple, primitive, happy… and a constant source of food as they are preyed upon by the vicious Morlocks.

If mankind suddenly finds the ability to take away all the painful memories, and we start knocking them out one by one, the entire house of cards that is our sense of identity and being will collapse.

We’ll be little more than the simple minded Eloi, and the ready victims of whatever Morlocks haunt the world in the future.

We all need our pain.