The privilege of pain — Text and Context

A Rhetoric of Revaluation

Everett's prose consistently works to invert common assumptions. She describes ill-health as offering a "blessed freedom" from "petty obligations, unworthy pleasures, and meaningless conventions." The phrasing is deliberate: freedom is typically associated with vigor, not sickness. She extends this logic to time itself, claiming that in America, leisure "can be found only in the sick-room." This rhetorical strategy—taking a negative and recasting it as a positive—pervades the essay. The tone is assured, even combative, as when she asserts that the majority of people are "occupied in accumulating superfluities" rather than living. The voice is that of a confident moralist, unafraid to indict societal values.

Historical Exemplars as Evidence

The essay builds its case through a series of biographical sketches. Everett cites figures such as Pitt the elder, who suffered from hereditary gout and periods of mental imbalance yet returned to Parliament to champion the American Colonies; Talleyrand, lamed in childhood, who forfeited his inheritance but became a key diplomat; and Henry Fawcett, blinded at twenty-five, whose disability concentrated his energies and led to reforms like the parcel post and postal orders. These examples are not merely listed but are used to argue that suffering can concentrate the mind and mellow character. The selection is eclectic—including Marat, whose revolutionary career followed a thirteen-day stupor—and the tone remains neutral, presenting each case as evidence for pain's transformative potential.

Pace and Accumulation

The essay's structure is cumulative rather than argumentative in a linear sense. Early sections establish the thesis; later ones, such as "The Freedom of Ill-Health," expand on specific benefits. The pace is deliberate, with each historical example adding weight to the central claim. Everett does not rush to prove her point but allows the reader to absorb one case after another. The prose is clear and direct, with occasional aphoristic turns: "We have degraded success by popularizing it." This rhythm—assertion, example, reflection—gives the work a meditative quality, inviting the reader to reconsider pain not as an interruption but as a potential source of insight.

Readers should approach this essay as a sustained argument rather than a personal testimony. Everett does not draw on her own experience of pain; instead, she marshals historical evidence and rhetorical inversion. The work rewards attention to its structure—how each example builds on the last—and to its provocative redefinition of freedom. It is a text that asks not whether pain is good, but what it might make possible.

That old essay on pain’s strange gifts lingered with me, how suffering sometimes strips away pretense. It put me in mind of another quiet volume, The instinct of workmanship, and the state of industrial arts — A Reader’s Guide, which speaks of craft as its own kind of patient discipline. Both feel like conversations with someone who has sat long with difficulty and come away gentler.