The Pain/Pleasure Dichotomy in Montaigne's Essais

What the hell I am doing anyway?

For you kids wondering why I delayed medical school for a year to study English literature, I've provided an excerpt from my work to disclose, at the very least, what I'm doing. The why, however, is a bit more difficult to answer...

This excerpt comes from my primary tutorial (more widely known in the States as a "class"). I am under the guidance of Dr Mary Ann Lund, who studies Renaissance literature, medicine, and religion. (Yeah, I know there's no period to abbreviate "doctor"—that's how they roll here. I think it's a way of signifying that the degree does not merely confer a title, but informs an identity—a name as natural as one's birth name that any attempt to abbreviate it would only serve to demean and deprive the identity of the person as a whole. Arguments to this assertion are welcome.)

Michel de Montaigne was a French statesman during the Renaissance that endured what has been called the most excruciating pain known to man (and I use the term in its biologically-specific sense): the kidney stone. Because he suffers, he is fair game for my "illness narrative" tutorial. Enjoy:

To illustrate the interdependency between pain and pleasure, Montaigne goes on to cite Socrates, who was ‘freed from the load of his fetters’ and ‘enjoyed the delicate tingling in his legs that their pressure had produced and…delighted in thinking about the close confederacy that there is between pain and pleasure’ . Montaigne himself even saw his acute fits of pain from his kidney stone as ‘a cure: when freed from it [the paroxysm] I consider that to be a durable and complete deliverance’ . So there is a complex dichotomy in the pain/pleasure binary, in which one (usually pleasure) can be derived from the other (correspondingly, pain).

To add a scientific stitch to the philosophical threading of pain and pleasure, clinical researchers at Harvard Medical School have shown that parts of the brain activated during pleasure are similarly activated during the sensation of pain, suggesting that the perception of both stimuli share a common neurological and sensory pathway . The interconnectedness of pleasure and pain, it seems, exists in the literary, philosophical, and neurobiological realms.