Our contemporary society experiences a disturbing paradox: we have elevated well-being to the status of an absolute, but at the same time, we have lost the ability to give meaning to suffering. Pain, which could be a teacher, has been reduced to an enemy to flee from.

Victimhood, so prevalent in public and private discourse, encloses the subject within their own wounds, turning them into hostages to their pain. And absolute presentism, fueled by digital immediacy and the logic of consumption, closes off memory and silences any openness to the eternal. Only the now matters: instant pleasure, relief on social media. In this climate, hope fades because it has no roots: it neither response to the memory of where we come from nor projects itself toward where we are going.

Two views, one truth

(Antonio Machado and Viktor Frankl)

Two voices, separated in time, converge on a common intuition: pain, far from being solely destruction, can become a fruitful memory and an opening to transcendence.

Pain: wound and possibility

For Machado, melancholy is born from the awareness of human pain: the fleeting nature of life, loneliness, the failure of dreams. In Soledades, he writes:

“Spring has come,
no one knows what it was like.”

Behind the apparent simplicity lies the anguish of a time that passes without return.

For Frankl, pain reached its extreme expression in the concentration camps. There he discovered that, even when everything is taken away, man retains an ultimate freedom: to choose his attitude.

“When a man discovers that his destiny is to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his unique and unrepeatable task.”
(V.E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning)

Thus, in both Machado and Frankl, pain appears as a wound that reveals the essential, a door to the depths of being.

The Roots, memory and salvation

Machado’s melancholy is nourished by memory. The memory of a Sevillian childhood, of the bright patio or the bright orchard, is more than nostalgia: it is the root of identity.

“My childhood is filled with memories of a Sevillian patio,
and a bright orchard where the lemon tree ripens…

“My story, some cases I don’t want to remember” (A. Machado, Portrait, Fields of Castile)

Memory rescues what has been lived, preserves what has been lost, and gives the present a unique depth.

Frankl also found support in memory: his wife’s face, contemplated internally, was his strength in the midst of horror.

“Man’s salvation lies in love and through love. The man who has known his destiny knows that someone is waiting for him.”
(V.E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning)

Memory that saves: in Machado, made poetry; in Frankl, made inner strength.

Transcendence, opening to meaning

Another apex of this experience is transcendence. Machado, from his spiritual depth, opens his poetry to a horizon that goes beyond the immediate:

“Last night as I slept,
I dreamed—blessed dream!
—that it was God
within my heart.”
(A. Machado, Proverbs and Songs)

Frankl formulates the same thing in an existential key: man is fulfilled only when he transcends himself, when he lives for a cause or a person greater than himself.

“Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must come… as a side effect of dedication to a greater cause or to another person.”
(VE Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning)

Both agree: suffering, open to the transcendent, ceases to be absurd and becomes a path to fulfillment.

Pain and suffering

The heart often confuses the two. As I point out in “The Self and Its Metaphors”:

“Understanding that the tooth hurts, but does not suffer, is part of personal location.”
(The Self and Its Metaphors)

Sadness and joy

Sadness can devour the soul like the “mouth of a lion” (The Art of the Good Fight). But also, in its positive version, it becomes a divine gift that leads to repentance and conversion.

Joy, on the other hand, is the fruit of a profound decision, not of a fleeting moment:

False joy is fleeting, like “a piece of gum, two minutes of flavor, and then nothing.”
True joy is the result of a journey that knows poverty, hunger, and tears, but is transformed into Thanksgiving in the face of adversity.

“Rejoice in the Lord always; I say again, rejoice.”
(Phil 4:4-5)

Freeing oneself from chains doesn’t mean eliminating pain, but rather learning to integrate it as a teacher. Memory and transcendence show us that suffering can be transformed into meaning, sadness into conversion, and joy into fulfillment.