It is the soul of literature to equalize the suffering of the idle classes to that of those held down, trampled underfoot, whose innards are dined upon and discarded over dinner conversation of what can be done to help the poor. For what is suffering? Is suffering the peasant, their back broken by labor, with large swollen hands but heads tiny with ideas, who go home to their families and laugh, and live simple lives, and who all they wish for is wealth? Or is it something deeper, an eccentric wearing a top-hat who beds alone, lives a life filled only with words that he pours out for his one true love, gifted and cursed with the subtle perception to appreciate such things? Or perhaps it is the genius malformed with insanity, whose family having tried very hard to convince to live a normal life, to adopt their empty ways, so refuses and throws down the gauntlet at life, unable to state a cause yet outcasting themselves on an empty ocean of eternity, beheld with contempt by his former ranks and dregs alike? Surely all suffering is equal. Surely the measure of the woe of a man (or in these enlightened times, a woman) goes beyond that of mere welfare, that of physical anguish, and may be measured only by their weight of words. For if this is not truth, then the pillars of civilization have lapsed into twilight. No, the anguish of the rich, the pains of malaise, the void of meaning burning in the heart to be mulled only ever so slightly by a snifter of cognac or the flashing mindwash of the screen, is all too real. So have books taught us. I stab at this truth. I rise against the tide of my caste, of Levin, of Roskolnikov, of Dickens and I say this must end. And I say so, ever boldly, from the comfort of my armchair, rising most inconveniently from being curled in my duvet reading of the suffering of an intellectual under my ancient French oillamp which had long ago been fitted with an incandescent fixture. I rise against it with the grace of language, form-fitting each syllable expertly in a manner rebellious to that taught me at university, standing over the precipice with the hubris of individuality to declare "This means something". My stomach rumbles, stricken by an ulcer I have carried through many years of striving for that intangible something of existence that we are more than the slugs of the earth. And my neck aches, burdened with the harsh existence of years at an office chair programming machines to usher in that next brave revolution of logic over entropy. So have my labors marked me. And you dare to say that I don't hurt. You would say that all of my efforts are for naught, that my precious words will be washed away like all the meaningless etchings of humanity upon the tide of time, eroding all. Perhaps. But I've gotten mine, even if I hold it with disgust.