How do you torture a person who only has a tenuous grasp on what pain feels like? I don’t wish to call my humanity into question, but physical sensations are largely removed from this place, for better or worse. I’ve observed him suffer, but he is hardly a trustworthy subject.
Rest assured, there is plenty of pain outside the realm of physical harm. To my knowledge, loneliness, failures, and farewells, feel as blunt and cold here, as they do there. Of those three, the last two are much harder to manufacture, especially if you envision a particularly rigorous routine of torture.
Loneliness has its own challenges. It’s certainly got the punch of suffering to it, but if your goal is to make an impression, it’s hard to do with an element that is so constant. I suppose I have to applaud his creativity, still sharp despite how rarely he uses it. I picture him, perusing the various blades and tools at his disposal, weighing out the cruelty in each one until he selects the one upon just viewing can elicit a confession.
The office was a little obvious, but you can’t argue with results. The temple that he worships at with so much fervor. This is where he begins to show his knowledge of suffering. Taking something bad, and then making it worse. Watching coworkers leave in the failing light of fall, those lucky souls striving to balance out the amount of time they are forced to spend here. But we remain.
I don’t cry out for a late night of work. It’s happened before, so when I felt the shudder pass through my body the first time, I just braced myself, and settled in. That was the first night. Even after the third time, too exhausted to think, I still hoped that it was just a busy stretch for him.
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I suppose this sounds like an overly dramatic response. I wouldn’t dispute that. But for my own being who has only known a sliver of the physical sensations in the world, this felt as if my entire being were being burned. Each night only made the following day of work even worse, until the walls started to close in. I felt the air growing scarce, and it felt as if I would soon be fully encased in resin.
When he dozed off at the office that one night, it hadn’t even been my intention of taking control. Is there intention behind the gasp for air when swimming up from a great depth? Regardless of the answer, he was always going to lash out, trying to make that second of control be inextricably tied with the worst suffering he could produce. Again, I have to really give him a hand. Denying me any other sensations, except for low-grade steady destruction. If the late nights here had burned me, those hours spent in front of the shredder where the bucket of gasoline tossed on the pyre.
Not everyone has such this intuition for suffering. However, at least as far as I know, torture is not an exact science. He certainly had the instincts to find what would break me the most. The next three times he did it, only further shattered the shards.
Theseus’s ship was broken slowly, piece by piece. Even then, what was taken away was replaced. The thought experiment requires there to be an intention of creating a whole ship again. In this case, if a ship has been battered and broken down into unrecognizable bits, and then reassembled by a mad man who was not necessarily building a ship, but a machine for revenge, is it still the same entity? Or is the monstrosity that remains something new entirely?