Sometimes it seems like "pain" is too obvious a place to turn for inspiration. Pain isn't always deep, anyway. Sometimes it's awful and that's it. Or boring. Surely other things can be as profound as pain.

On the ward there was hurt and pain so big and so deep that speech could not express it. I had been interested in philosophy, and suddenly philosophy came alive for me, for here the basic questions of human existence were not abstractions: they were embodied in human suffering