Sometimes I ques­tion whether or not I really know what suf­fer­ing is. Reading back on my last entry, it struck me that in many ways, my life wasn’t that bad.

A Hero Of Our Time was writ­ten dur­ing great mil­i­tary con­flict, where peo­ple were fre­quently “exiled” by being sent to remote places along the front of the Russian-Circassian War, where Russia had already been fight­ing for over 40 years. Some may argue that I don’t truly under­stand suf­fer­ing, because my cul­ture hasn’t been through some­thing like this, whereas such pain is already in the blood of Russians. Even in pop­u­lar cul­ture, such as Babylon 5, the Russian char­ac­ter Susan Ivanova (whom I quoted in this tweet) seems to fol­low this stereotype.

If you look at Aya Nagatomi’s per­for­mances of Chopin, specif­i­cally her inter­pre­ta­tion of his Étude Op. 10, No. 12, you can tell that it’s tech­ni­cally amaz­ing — cer­tainly a vir­tu­oso in the mak­ing as she’s only 19 in this video — but you don’t feel the rubato with which Chopin intended it. As such, it sounds like it’s being per­formed by a com­puter. You have to won­der whether it takes a cer­tain degree of hard­ship expe­ri­enced to do it jus­tice, per­haps going through the polit­i­cal tur­moil of the November Uprising in Warsaw that inspired Chopin to write this Revolutionary Étude.

Could Leonard Cohen have been able to pen a song like Famous Blue Raincoat with­out hav­ing suf­fered through a few lonely nights in New York City? I think not.

I don’t know enough about Chinese his­tory to know what my ances­tors went through. The rel­a­tives I know of in pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions escaped the Cultural Revolution — where they would have been sub­jected to unbe­liev­able hard­ships — to Hong Kong. Maybe it’s not in my blood, and I’m just drawn to the idea of Nihilism on a super­fi­cial level, never truly under­stand­ing it any deeper.

But a long time ago, I remem­ber read­ing an entry by Tina where she felt dis­turbed by other people’s opin­ions on how jaded she was feel­ing, as they were say­ing she had noth­ing to feel bad about. I told her not to com­pare her­self to oth­ers. That one per­son going through heart­break is a dif­fer­ent kind of suf­fer­ing than a per­son going with­out food, and that one can’t said to be more “painful” than the other.

I may have been well-fed, healthy, and from a middle-class fam­ily in my child­hood. But none of things mat­tered to me because it was the emo­tional con­nec­tion that I was seek­ing, but could never find.

I’ve always had the bad habit of com­par­ing myself to oth­ers. I should prob­a­bly just fol­low my own advice and enjoy the com­fort, beauty, and inspi­ra­tion that Russian lit­er­a­ture gives me.

After all, if I can acknowl­edge that my suf­fer­ing is my own, no one else would truly under­stand anyway!