31st July
In August 1931 he was thinking about pain. In a letter to George Thomson, a Cambridge friend, he worried that 'the doctrine that pain’s an opportunity for the spirit… gets used by people who have forgotten what pain is’. He acknowledged that pain might be 'distilled’ by the memory into a form of happiness, but he claimed a 'high place’ for 'direct happiness’, without pain. He remained uneasy about attempts to elevate pain: it 'can be so overwhelming that it has tempted people of all ages to look for some inherent value in it’. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 1 August 1931)
