Under miserable conditions, when you’re uncertain of any certainty and exhausted of any hope, you, still, can find the meaning of life.
Don’t mistake this statement for some pep talk extract. This is the conclusion, Victor E. Frankl draws by surviving the excruciating conditions of the Holocaust. If you read this memoir cum psychiatric analysis, he will pierce us with the accounts of spine-chilling struggles and comfort us, factually, by convincing us that there will be light.
According to Victor a holocaust prisoner, vaguely, goes through three stages in prison life.
Stage 1 — Delusional Reprieve — It is the outcome of the initial shock of becoming a holocaust prisoner. While first facing the grave danger, a tiny hope for luck emerges thinking that they will somehow be saved.
Stage 2 — Apathy — Complete loss of emotion. After days of whips, thrashes and multitudes of pain, a prisoner will start to lose the faith in any human hope.
Final Stage — Giving Up — Apathy slowly pushes the person to lose hope in life. Eventually leads to one’s death. Not a graceful one but a succumbed one.
This paints the human being as a faint being at first, but for this very reason, the author tries to crack down on the real human potential. Under crippling pain of his all-day labour, he remembers, ‘‘yet the sleep came and brought oblivion and relief from pain for a few hours’’. I pitied him at first, then I got intrigued. Then I didn’t stop reading. Wrath of ruthless SS, self-crowned capos and all their tantrums upon prisoners were heart-wrenching.
After piercing us with these memoirs, he quotes Nietzsche, “He who has strong `why` to live for can bear with almost any `how`” to start on how a person withstood and can withstand suffering. In the above crippling excruciations, he found his ‘Why’ — To survive this camp, somehow, with dignity and go back to the love of life, his wife. He experienced his joyous memories with his wife in such detail and realised that this will get him through the suffering. He started to see suffering as the process to get to her. He shifted his mindset to not expect anything from life instead be responsible about what life expects of him and tackles everything that life throws at him.
The author concludes that ‘There’s no general purpose in life. The purpose of life changes from person to person from moment to moment, so, we have to responsibly face the challenges that life throws at us. There’s meaning in suffering. There’s always someone looking down on us to come out through all these sufferings in a responsible and dignified way.’ The facts and case studies that the author presented to support his conclusion did the job, very well.
I feel that the natural world is far beyond our understanding. Since I could accept that I know little of the complex and infinite universe, I accept the author’s views and I recommend this to all those who’re in pursuit of meaning/purpose in life.
On the downside, the first part was a bit of a struggle for me as there was no orderly flow of events. The font was also not legible on the paperback physical book, go for a kindle read. Otherwise, the book was nothing but enlightening.
My rating is 3.5 / 5.
Happy Reading! Cheers!
