Many mornings we find ourselves waking up to thoughts that question the purpose of our existence. The endless monotony of our lives makes us wonder why we do the things we do. I am no different. I have spent years questioning the sufferings of life. I have always wished for someone, anyone who can answer these questions for me and put an end to this agony. I realised I have been looking in the wrong direction, until I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.
This classic book comprises two parts. In the first part Viktor Frankl chronicles his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. The second part introduces you to the concept of Logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy founded by Viktor Frankl. Although I have read about Holocaust through internet and various articles, this was the first time I was reading a full blown book based on it.
Being aware of the horrors of these camps, I was prepared to drown myself in tears of despair. However, my experience with the book turned out to be quite the opposite. It was empowering to my surprise and I can’t begin to explain the strange strength that it instilled within me. It could probably be because of the detached, ‘academic’ narrative style of the author. It could also be because of the realization that none of my sufferings are nowhere near to that of Viktor’s.
The book doesn’t merely chronicle the everyday experiences of a concentration camp. Instead, it examines the human behaviour through each of these events and thereby encourages you to introspect the events in your own life and your reactions to them. That the ‘existential vacuum’, ‘the state of boredom’, and ‘sunday neurosis’ of which Viktor spoke of as early as 1945 is still relatable in 2021 is rather preposterous and yet comforting. When he speaks of ‘the thought of suicide’ as something that “was entertained by nearly everyone if only for a brief time”, I begin to understand a little of the many suicidal deaths that left me rattled in 2020. He says, “It was born of the hopelessness of the situation, the constant danger of death looming over us daily and hourly, and the closeness of the deaths suffered by many of the others”.
The part where Viktor talks of his wife and how “Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved”, is achingly beautiful. Despite the knowledge that he survived the camp, your heart skips a beat when you learn of those days when he was walking a thin wall between death and freedom. From the young woman who talks to the tree to those men who walk through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread, the book brings to you many inspiring tales. As Frankl puts it, “They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
The greatest comfort that the book gave me, however, was the opportunity to realign my attitude to the circumstances of life. I remember writing in the beginning of 2020, that I would ditch ‘forced positivity’. However, Frankl’s inspiring inferences have got me thinking again. According to him, “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
Not the answer I was expecting, but this changes the way I look at life and its purposefulness. I am only grateful that this is one of the books I started the year with because it fills me with such hope and vigor.
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