/lit/ - Literature

>>10768980
Based on my personal experience I would say that suffering is essential to strength of character. To use an extremely obvious and basic analogy, you would never hope to become physically strong if you never tried to lift more weight, or tried to run farther. I suppose that strife and triumph naturally exist together. If we have strife but no triumph then this is hell. Triumph without the strife must certainly feel hollow, if it could exist at all. With the memory of suffering how are we to know that a triumph has arrived?

As to your second question, with only the most abstract conditions, I am having trouble thinking of a case where it would be more valuable to be comforted rather than to be triumphant. This hinges on the use of the word "valuable." An independent triumph becomes a tool for all possible futures, something to recall and reference; to say nothing of the immediate benefits to character. Now maybe some are more receptive than others, but I should think this is true for all people. Now if instead of valuable we were speaking in terms of something like instant reward vs a later payoff.

>>10769000
Yes, it is important to have the ability or awareness to catalog the suffering. To benefit requires some amount of meta-cognition about the current state. Otherwise you will just continue to suffer (maybe the common choice).

>>10768988
We are engaging with texts.

>>10769010
Are you implying that there is nothing to the idea of character? Or that character is fixed? When you encounter an obstacle do you not recognize the oppurtunity to dig in and work, or recall previous times you have done so?

>>10769017
To quote the cyclist Greg Lemond:
>It never gets easier, you just go faster.