I will not "read" the whole book onto my blog but it is such a great book! So I want to save some of the more meaningful (to me) statements.. We have a tendency to look into the past to help make the present bearable. in robbing the present of reality, it becomes easy to overlook opportunities to make something positive. It is a pecularity of man that he can only live looking to the future. This is his salvation in the most difficult moments, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task. ((Remember this author is a survivor of the concentration camps)).
He who has a "why" to live for can bear with almost any "how".
It doesn't really matter what we expect from life but rather what life expects from us.
What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you. Having been is also a kind of being, perhaps the surest kind.
There are two races of men, the race of the decent and the race of the indecent.
No one has the right to do wrong, even if wrong has been done to them.
Mental health is based on certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish (the gap between what one is and what one should become).
Boredom causes more problems to solve than distress!
The meaning of life...differs from man to man, from day to day, and from hour to hour. Everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. Each person decides whether he should interpret his life task as being responsible to society or to his own conscience.
We can discover the meaning of life in 3 different ways (1) by creating work or doing a deed (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. The second way of finding meaning in life is by experiencing something-such as goodness, truth, beauty-by experiencing nature and culture or, last but not least, by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness--by loving him. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.
(3) We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. It is man's main concern not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather see a meaning in his life.
Some of the people who nowadays call on a psychiatrist would have seen a pastor, priest or rabbi in former days.
"That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast."
After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.
As to the causation of the feeling of meaninglessness, one may say, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning. "Unemployment neurosis"..being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life. So people should fill their free time with some sort of unpaid but meaningful activity. The truth is that man does not live by welfare alone.
The perception of meaning more specifically boils down to becoming aware of what can be done about a given situation. If one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still CHOOSE his ATTITUDE.
Society blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual's value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler's program.
The book ends with the following paragraph:
You may be prone to blame me for invoking examples that are the exceptions to the rule. (Everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find). Saints or just decent people are in the minority. They will always remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge o join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.
So, let us be alert--alert in a twofold sense:
Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.
And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.
No comments:
Post a Comment