(After rereading 'The Love of God and Affliction' [Weil].) I shall never forget my introduction to the affliction of others. It was, over a series of visits, the prolonged dying of my grandmother. I must have been 17, and what i felt was nothing but horror and revulsion. These were not the prescribed emotions: it separated me forever from the unreality of social roles. It was like an initiation into truthfulness, to admit that that was what i felt. For the rest of my family, it was only a nightmare which they soon went back to sleep from. Me it woke up. Since then i have been honest to myself about my feelings, or else very soon began suffering from the lie. Only comparatively recently have i understood this as an advantage and not a weakness. For i wished that my feelings did not contradict the intention of my (feigned) behavior; i wanted not only to lie with my face, but with my guts. And i couldn't. So i had to, finally, give up lying. This has nothing to do with virtue. (Except as wholeness is goodness.)
  --And makes 'romance' for me exceedingly problematical. I am always aware of the mixture of feelings which exist in me at any moment: and to act in awareness of impurity is to act ambiguously. This does not make for trust. I was much easier to trust when i could lie convincingly. Now i cannot be untruthful that sincerely.

If i could come home and not keep thinking about people, no amount of contact with misfortune would make me miserable... But when there are a dozen persons i love whose health, economic selfsufficiency, and perhaps sanity are on the edge--why, the blackest horror seems a perfectly adequate description of this city, this country, or this planet. Knowing it isn't so, fails to reach it. And to reconcile (once again) my thoughts and my feelings, would take either superabundant joy, or an intelligent capitulation to despair.
  But why shouldn't intolerable situations pose insoluble problems? Admitting this is not to give up on problem-solving. It's learning a limit; SCALE.

A slow enlightenment, like being flayed alive: years to understand, what Gautama saw in an hour.