A Grief Observed Reading (6)

and you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.
-stake: (내기에 거는) 판돈
-“how much was the stake?” 판돈이 얼마였어?

H. would have forced me to admit in a few passes.
-‘in a few passes’에서 passes: attempts or rounds of questioning or interrogation.

I said it was like being concussed
-concuss: 뇌진탕을 일으키다

All that stuff about the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred.

The sort of thing is never said without some pleasure. Gets it ‘off your chest.’ You feel better for a moment.
-when you get something ‘off your chest,’ you express or admit to a feeling, thought, or secret, typically in a manner that relieves some emotional burden.

What is grief compared with physical pain? Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind. The mind has always some power of evasion. At worst, the unbearable thought only comes back and back, but the physical pain can be absolutely continuous. Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours of it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static; pain often is.
-“really?” This passage threw me a big question. Not the part on physical pain, but the one talking about grief.

But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good.
-‘네가 대항해 선 것이‘ 온전히 선한 의도뿐인 의사라면.

But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary.

Either way, we’re for it.
-어느 쪽이든, 우리는 받아들여야 한다.