“Pain doesn’t have a face and pain doesn’t have a certain way of adjusting. Pain is universal.”
—Aunjanue Ellis

While everyone else was still sleeping off the revelry that accompanied the last days of 2008, I was at the Getty with my future husband. I walked through the exhibits more quickly than Mark, who is an avid reader of every single placard. While Mark dallied, I ended up back in the museum’s center walkway by myself. In an exhibition hall off to my left was a dark, cavernous space. It beckoned me. Inside, there were huge human faces from people of many different backgrounds and colors lining the walls. Faces I would normally see at twelve by six inches, roughly the size of a sheet of paper, were hanging on eight by six foot canvases, so that a nose was the length of my torso. I could examine every freckle, line, muscle, and crease. Each face displayed a different emotion. There was anger, featuring a furrowed brow, hooded eyes, and narrow down-turned mouth. It was a stunning portrait, but I felt unnerved by its gaze and I walked quickly by, if only to get out of the picture’s eyeline. Laughter made me smile, with its telltale mouth and eye crinkles. But it was pain that was the hardest to look at. I wanted to help the person, alleviate their suffering, and while I can’t remember whether it was a man or woman, I remember the lowered brow, the tightening of the eyes, and the deepening of the mouth. I remember that I was shaken after standing there helpless.

The guiding question of the exhibit was, what emotions were the most readable on a stranger’s face? The placard told me that the photographer had tested (albeit non-scientifically) the universality of human emotions. While traveling around the world, the photographer had pocket-size versions of the portraits, and asked strangers to identify the emotion expressed in the portrait. Could they tell what the subject in the photo was feeling? What I remember most was this: pain is more apparent on the face, more readable from person to person, than happiness and laughter. Humans know pain when they see it. Which is why I ran out of the exhibit, found Mark, and pulled him over to experience it too.

Ever since the Greek philosophers, humans have been trying to understand pain, to understand suffering. Epicurus defined pleasure as “the absence of pain in the body and of troubles in the soul.” Modern science tells us that pain is a primary emotion, an emotion derived as a part of reaction to outside stimuli. The authors in this issue tackled the idea representing pain through their stories. Some write about physical pain, whether it’s the pain of a broken body, like in “Through the Window,” or a deteriorating one, like in “The G-Tube.” As readers, we inhabit the malfunctioning bodies of the narrators and either shut down or lash out with them. In addition to physical pain, the author of “Tomorrow Morning” confronts the idea of emotional pain, specifically that related to embarrassment. There is also the pain of physical distance, as the narrator in “Things Gone Bad” experiences as a parent of a child in the NICU. Or maybe the distance is more cerebral and intangible than plastic incubators, like the kind the narrator of “Going Outside”—whose mother is no longer who she used to be—is going through. Both authors indicate that there is a specific kind of emotional pain we experience when we are unable to help the ones we love through their pain. Then, finally, we have the pain of grief, which is a world unto itself. It’s accurately captured in “3.6 Pounds,” where a narrator is dealing with the complicated death of a loved one in the attack on the Twin Towers. Both collective and specific—as “3.6 Pounds” elucidates—grief is full of every imaginable pain. It encompasses emotional, physical, and existential pain. These pieces expose the human reluctance to discuss our most vulnerable areas and our biggest fears with the people we should trust the most: our loved ones and our doctors.

The artist Ai Weiwei once asked, “If my art has nothing to do with people’s pain and sorrow, what is ‘art’ for?” In the previous issue on conversation, I wrote that the purpose of writing was human connection. Nothing seems to connect people to people better than art, which is a concept that I borrowed from David Ulin. In The Lost Art of Reading, he indicates that the best, or perhaps the only, way to inhabit someone’s consciousness is to read their writing. And while that concept makes me feel validated as a reader, there is nothing that has made me better understand the compulsion to write, my compulsion to write than this quote from the book: “No, I’m thinking more of literature as a voice of pure expression, a cry in the dark.” A cry being both a shout and a physical reaction, this quote always makes me think that somehow we are all huddled together in the dark shouting out to see if anyone else is there, feeling the same pain.

The work in this issue is indicative of our human need to talk, weep, whisper, holler, and examine this thing called pain. Pain is a force at the center of our fragile mortal life. It has a profound effect on our lives either because we are in it, we are avoiding it, or both—and our art, our pictures, our words are profound ways to articulate it.

AM Larks is the fiction editor of Please See Me.