There is no suffering the mind can imagine that the body cannot produce.

From Alfred’s journal

A man sat on the bench by the hardware store this morning with his hand pressed flat against his jaw, and he did not move it for twenty minutes. A tooth, I think. He had the look of someone who had stopped being a person with a life and become a person with a tooth. For years I believed the old thing, that the worst of it happens upstairs, that dread and grief outrun anything a nerve can manage; birds get this wrong because we die quickly and are not around to be corrected. There is no suffering the mind can imagine that the body cannot produce. Switch broke a claw last winter on the feeder lip and for two days he did not speak, he only held it, and nothing in his small head was going on at all except that claw.