"The Pain Scale"

"The Pain Scale" by Eula Bliss is an interesting read to say the very least and does a fairly good job of making the reader think about what exactly defines pain through various examples as she goes through the different numbers of the pain scale. Although Eula isn't exactly very linear in her thought pattern as she goes on through the scale and it at times comes off as confusing she nonetheless is able to convey and makes us question ourselves and our conventional understanding of pain. Her anecdotes are interesting and sporadic but still serve as an interesting quirk to her essay as she evolves the pain higher and higher through her essay.

One of the points that most stuck out to me as Eula talked about the pain scale was her paralleling the various levels to the levels of Hell, as described in Dante's Inferno, as she goes through her essay but then suddenly making note that there is no tenth level of Hell as she goes on to talk about the final threshold of pain. Perhaps it is due to my own religious side of the issue that I find this a very interesting point of note, that is to say to compare the pain scale and the levels of Hell side by side and then to state that there is no actual tenth level as if to totally make the comparisons she had made arbitrary. I can imagine that this is a sort of indirect statement then that the tenth level of pain is left to our imagination and something that will never be explicitly known or stated. To put it this way, although no one will ever be able to directly prove that they are or are not experiencing the greatest pain imaginable people as a whole will always have the idea that there is indeed a greatest pain possible beyond what they are experiencing no matter the pain they are in. This is a parallel to Dante's Inferno in that although we look at the Devil and his locked state in ice as the final level of Hell as described in the story, one can also wonder if there is a level even deeper in the depths of Hell as in the story he was not able to delve any further than the described level. Perhaps there is a level of hell reserved for those that are even more despicable then those who betrayed the son of God, a special place where one is tortured beyond what had been previously described for their awful crimes against heaven. The imagination is perhaps the biggest reason why then that we refuse to quantify ten or the max to anything because we are to be honest an unsure people. When we quantify the max to anything then that means that is the end, there is no beyond that and we must work around the known maximum. It is then the fear of the max and our imagination of the true that keeps all our numbers quantifying in reality between 1-9 on the pain scale.