Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

The line asserts that suffering, however unwanted, is preferable to emptiness or nonexistence. It treats pain as evidence of aliveness—of feeling, attachment, and engagement with the world—whereas “nothing” suggests numbness, void, or annihilation. In a Faulknerian key, the sentiment aligns with a broader moral psychology in which endurance, memory, and the capacity to feel (even acutely) are bound up with human dignity. The preference for pain over nothing can also be read as an artistic credo: intense experience, including anguish, furnishes the raw material of meaning and narrative, while blankness offers no knowledge, no transformation, and no story.