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Be Not Afraid sufferingat the stake? Were they some sort of super-evildoers?And yet, he noted, it is always the innocent who seemto be punished most zealously. What does that sayabout those who torture them? Why do they prosper,instead of the good?In agonizing over these questions at length, however,Solzhenitsyn stopped tangling himself up (as he put it)in the riddle of suffering, and began to make peacewith the fact that whether or not he understood it, itwould still exist. And with this acceptance came a newinsight:From then on I felt that the solution to suffering is this:that the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as wehave grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in thedevelopment of the soul. From that point of view ourtorturers have been punished most horribly of all: theyare turning into swine; they are departing downwardfrom humanity. From that point of view punishment isinflicted on those whose development…holds out hope.Looking back, I saw that for my whole conscious life Ihad not understood either myself or my strivings. Whathad seemed for so long to be beneficial now turned outin actuality to be fatal, and I had been striving to go inthe opposite direction to that which was truly necessaryfor me. But just as the waves of the sea knock the11