Success Quote by Rachel Field

Pain, in Field's formulation, is a tyrant with a vanishing act. Once it releases you, it feels almost fictional, like a bad dream you can't fully reconstruct at breakfast. But while it "held one fast", it wasn't merely one experience among many; it was the experience that canceled the rest. The sentence works because it captures a psychological insult pain adds on top of the physical one: it doesn't just hurt, it commandeers attention so completely that memory, future plans, even the outside world flatten into irrelevance.

Field's phrasing plays a clever trick with "reality". We tend to grant reality to what we can verify and narrate. Pain resists narration. You can report it, but you can't share it; language turns it into an approximation. So when the pain is gone, it loses "reality" because it can't be re-entered with the mind's usual tools. Yet when it's present, it becomes the only reality precisely because it bypasses those tools and speaks in pure sensation.

The subtext is about empathy and its limits: anyone who says "it couldn't have been that bad" is, in a sense, telling the truth about their present self while erasing the past self who was trapped inside the body. Written in the early 20th century, amid influenza, war injuries, and constrained medical relief, the line also reads as a quiet critique of stoicism. Field isn't romanticizing suffering; she's diagnosing its power and the amnesia that makes us underestimate it once we survive.