Faith and complexity: "The Pain Scale" by Eula Biss

“The Pain Scale” by Eula Biss is an interesting piece that explores many different ideas through a general reflection about quantifying personal experiences such as pain. Biss experiences chronic, un-diagnosable pain, and in “The Pain Scale” she discusses how strange it is that doctors request their patients to rate their pain with numbers. She includes other subtopics throughout her discussion, including the correlation between faith, optimism and suffering, and she mentions the importance of the idea of things that we can neither see nor truly imagine such as zero and infinity, and compares them to faith and Jesus. I thought it was interesting that Biss said, “Christianity is not mine” because she mentions how encouraging some of the ideas of faith are to her. She says that when she is experiencing severe pain she has learned to cherish the phrase “This too shall pass” and relates suffering to what Jesus experienced on the cross, she says it is “divine”.  Biss also contemplates ideas that, like Faith, are not only impossible for us to prove in our world, but impossible for us to truly understand or comprehend. She brings up the mathematical concepts of zero and infinity because they both have been theorized to exist and are required to solve or define complex mathematical problems, but we have never seen them or understood them. “The Pain Scale” has a unique format that allows Biss to jump from idea to idea, while still incorporating her past reflections. The piece is set up by the numbers 0-10 which is reminiscent of a doctor’s pain scale, and a discussion is offered under each number. For instance, under the number 5, Biss talks about how this is the most commonly used number by people who are not in excruciating pain because people have a tendency to desire normalcy. I think the format Biss used to write “The Pain Scale” made it an extremely effective piece, however it is very hard to define what exactly the piece is, but I believe it can be defined as a sort of personal reflection.