In a tiny grove with flowers everywhere, young girls of days gone by sit looking in their mirrors.

They say: “Sometimes we think that we have grown old. That our hair is white and our eyes no longer clear as the new moon … but it is not true! Our mirrors are bewitched with winter, and they lie! It is the mirrors that make our hair like snow and wrinkle our young faces! But wicked winter can bewitch our mirrors only, not ourselves … Forever we are unchanged.” ~Wang Chang-ling*

Freud noted that suffering comes from three directions: the feebleness of our bodies, the superior power of nature, and more painful to us than that of any other, our relations with others. He also wrote, “In the last analysis, all suffering is nothing else than sensation; it only exists in so far as we feel it, and we feel it in consequence of certain ways in which our organism is regulated.” The few who possess the ability to experience pleasure through special dispositions and gifts do not have “an impenetrable amour against the arrows of future.”**

*Trans Anonymous. The Jade Flute by various authors. The Project Gutenberg eBook of the Jade Flute

** source: Peter Gray, ed., The Freud Reader  (New York, 1998)