0 Frankly Speaking

Dear Mr. Frankl,

Thank you. I recently read your book, Man's Search for Meaning, in my Philosophy class and even though I can't know for sure, I'm positive that it has changed it. In my education for outside of it, I have read many books on the Holocaust. There is little that surprises me about it, yet the terrible acts that went on still affects me. Yet, your book was not a rehousing of gas chambers and torture. It was something more, about man and the potential of humanity and how we play with the cards we're dealt.

There are so many points where you stop just talking about life in the concentration camp and examine life as a whole. For example, my favorite passage was:

“To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.”

This struck home with me. Just the day before I read that, we were discussing comparing sufferings in my class. We were talking about a failed grade not being worth as much as a term in a concentration camp. Someone brought up the fact that you cannot compare sufferings but we couldn’t quite put into words what we meant. The analogy you use and the way you phrase it perfectly describes suffering. While reading this passage (and while I reread it many a time), I wondered: was the reference to the chamber intentional? Did you think of the analogy because of the gas chambers around you? I can’t see something more powerful to use. For the prisoners of the concentration camp, they were literally killed by their suffering when it became too much, even in their vessels.

Another thing in your book that kind of spoke to me was the passage about religion. When you were talking about politics and religion being the exceptions to the cultural hibernation in the camps, at first this didn’t make sense. The politics part, I could understand. But I’ve never been an overly religious person. Or, any kind of religious at all. But then it got me thinking. Why would, in a camp where everything else stopped, would one still believe in their god, their god who let or made these terrible things happen to them. I searched the internet a bit and gathered that in dark times, regardless of the cause, people needed spiritual guidance. They needed something to help them carry on, regardless of how they got into that situation. If I was in that situation, regardless of my current beliefs, I could see myself converting, if only to find some semblance of help. In their song “Breakeven (Falling to Pieces)” by The Script, they sing, “I’m still alive but I’m barely breathing/Just praying to a god that I don’t believe in.” From what you wrote, this is what would happen to me. When you’re barely breathing, barely lasting, even if you don’t believe, you need something behind you.

A theme of my life right now, as is normal I”d assume of most teenagers, is my search for the meaning in my life. I’m full of question right now. Why am I here? Why do I go on? Why do I even bother? Your socratic esque way of questioning, that deals with the right now rather than the past, is something I’m trying to adopt into my own life. As Brendan Benson sings in his song, “I don’t know what I’m looking for but I know that I just wanna look some more.” Thanks to your guidance, I know the right things to look for. I now know to focus on my current and my future rather than my past. To use a cards reference once again, we all are dealt from the same deck and the outcome of the game depends on how you use your hand, no one who has won in the past.

Thank you for you immense wisdom and for your book on it,

Sydney Gillary

1 Five Fat Turkeys Are We...

"I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose."
- Woody Allen

Every year in September, I'm faced with the terrible task of figuring out how am I going to survive classes when I don't know the people in there. And this year, in philosophy, that was kind of a no brainer. Somehow, I fell into this group of people who are funny and smart and only sometimes unstable and it's a great change from me being alone in the corner like in the past.

The point of this week’s assignment is to be grateful for a classmate but I have no idea how I'm supposed to choose just one. There's Katherine, who keeps me wonderfully unhinged at times, and Chris, who is my constant reminder of life outside of class and of class in outside life. There's Jack who never has a freaking pen, even when he has one, and is part of my island when we’re somehow seperated from the rest of our continent, and there's Dan who actually wants to focus on the task, that is, until he realizes that Chris’s water-bottle is really fun to hit.

But if I have to choose, if I have to pick just one, there's Sonia, dear Sonia, who plays count the black people when it comes to theater, who actually is paying attention to the assignment, who moves us forward and is willing to go back when we get ourselves lost anyway. Sonia, who makes the weirdest noises most randomly and is the one out of us six who participates the most. She offers interesting perspectives into assignments and puts the most effort into them. She’s the navigation on our miserable little ship, and without her we would have been lost all the way back in Candide.

0 And Now, a Pause.

"The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life."
- Plato

 Today, (the 8th of November) is the last day of the first quarter of the 2012-2013 school year. Today is when we take a pause and look back over what we've accomplished, what we wish to achieve, and where we generally want to go from here.

My answer (and one of the easy ones), is forward. We must go forward.

I mean that in as many ways is  humanly possible to means things. I mean that we must further ourselves in our intellectual thoughts. We must continue on reading and discussing and helping and trying to understand. We must try to actively participate in our thoughts and understanding. We must debate more and think more and not get each other on the first go. We must comment a lot more. We must, above all else, learn.

We can only do that by proceeding down the people mover of life. We cannot level off (deemed, "sideways") or even recede. We don't have to agree on what forward means in relation to this class. Forward can be whatever you think it is. It can be anarchy if you're curly haired and want that, go for it.

It doesn't matter as long as it's up and forward. Positive slope and whatnot. I think that's how it goes in math or something.

You know, as long as your forward includes more debates. The debates are pretty great. It's the best way to try on ideas for size and exercise thoughts and they leave the participants feeling mentally exhausted but at the same time totally fulfilled in a way wr don't get in our other classes.

1 Not a Game of Heads or Tails

 "Thinking isn't agreeing or disagreeing. That's voting."

- Robert Frost

It's that magical time of the year again and no, not Christmas. There's slinging mud in the air and propaganda everywhere. And, just like with the remixes of classic Christmas music playing far into January, everyone is absolutely, positively sick of it. And Voltaire and Camus? They'd be the sickest.

Well, not the sickest. But some of them.

Voltaire would not vote at all. The last theme of Candide is that we must cultivate our own gardens, not to have the government cultivate it for us. The characters no matter what happens determine their own fate, separate from societal influences. We are not what society is onto us and thus voting would not matter.

Camus definitely wouldn't vote. If he was as detached as Mersault was, he wouldn't even think of voting.

1 Have Sex and Make Babies...

"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering." 

- Friedrich Nietzsche

 A few years ago, I decided that life is meaningless. Well, less decided and more realized. This did not go over well with few-years-ago Sydney. It's hard to realize that everything you've done, everything you will do, has no rhyme or reason. Everything was hopeless and miserable.

That is, until I also realized something else. Yes, life has no meaning. There's no set assigned meaning. Our purpose in life isn't to have sex and make babies anymore. Life is a blank slate.

But that's the point. It's a blank slate. It means that the world is full of possibilities. Life has no meaning, thus you can assign any meaning to it.  Life is meaningless so we can assign meaning to our life.

For me, education, communication, literature, and people hold meaning.

Education is the most important though. Without education we have nothing. I guess the meaning in education  comes from my constant exposure to educators. Both of my parents have worked for CPS for many years. So have some of my aunts. I've always been around teachers and I see what happens when people are well educated and what happens when they aren't. I've seen how much school can help and how much teachers love and will do for their students.

And I've seen what it's done for me. I've seen how I'm a lot better off than other people of my background. I attribute that to my parents' emphasis on education which they passed on to me.

A lot of people have something against schools and I can understand why. The  basic set up for a school is very linear. Every day feels like it's filled with busywork and it can be mind-numbing. I get it. But I feel like that's the system's fault, not education itself. Education is wonderful. Without education, we wouldn't be able to know. We need basic knowledge. We learn from the subjects in ways you wouldn't expect. You just have to assign meaning to it, find what you're actually getting from it. From presentations in class you learn public speaking, working in group, and how to communicate ideas effectively to others. From math class, you learn to approach problems in your life from different ways. From history you learn from others' mistakes. And it goes on. You won't remember a lot of it later in life. You won't remember names and dates, the specifics. But you'll remember the lessons from it. You'll remember the true meaning, even if you don't realize you remember. After all, after a certain point we don't even known how we know what we know.

My point is, education is majorly important, not just for succeeding in life but for making it through. There are things we learn from the education system that we need to function for the rest of our lives, even if the presentation of the information is crap at the moment. You need to know how to live under a routine. You need to learn how to deal with authority. you need to learn how to deal with deadlines and commitments and how to balance your life. Education is more than just plugging and chugging with equations. Education is everywhere in life. It's lessons you learn from biographies and it's tolerance you get when you sit next to that really annoying kid in 5th period. Education is how we prepare for the future and it's incredibly important. You can tell the people who never learned certain skills and you can tell how it hurt them. You know the only children who never learned to share. You know the people who never had to present or deal with being forced with others. They stick out with like a sore thumb because they struggle with things in which they were not educated in.

Education has meaning to me. It's how I'm preparing for the future. Sometimes, I'm really sure that I'm not going to make it. I'm sure that my days are numbered and I don't have the most time left. Education is how I'm more confident that I'm not just going to fail come adult life. And that's important to me. Really important.  And thus education is.

0 A Weird Version Of Mean Girls...

"Fear follows crime and is its punishment."
- Voltaire

Okay, so lets say that I kill someone. Let's say his name was Aidan and he was Irish or something along those lines. Now lets suspend reality even more and say that I got caught. The evidence is airtight and noncircumstantial. And there's no hope for my lawyer for getting me off (and me shouting that he deserved it, that he was asking for it, that I won and that's all that matters didn't really help either) and this is his only defense: that I am insane. And they'd diagnose me and say it was true and lock me up in the big white room with the fluffy everywhere. And why? Because I'm insane and cannot help myself. The punishment isn't really fair

The same goes for Candide.

This is not to say that he's insane. Not at all. Our boy is many things: naive, a bit stupid, a bit rash, etc. But he is not insane. It's the naivety and the stupidity as a result of his naivety. And you can't punish someone for being stupid. It's not his fault or something that he can help. He just doesn't understand. He grew up behind castle walls thinking they were the best of all possible worlds. He doesn't know how the real world works. He doesn't know better. He doesn't know that walking away from the army may seem deserting or how evil recruiters look. Most if not all of his punishments were results of him not getting it.

One time he was punished because of Pangloss. This may be taken as a result of his nativity. If he was more worldly, he may have known that hanging with Pangloss would only lead to trouble. But he's not the one to day the words. Those may or may not have been his beliefs. But he is punished for who he associates with. And that's never right.

But it happens.

1 In A Game Of Chicken, Cars Always Win...

"The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing."
- Socrates

Okay, think about something you know. Something you're super sure that you know and you have little to no doubt about. Something that is undeniably true. Not something like your name or your address or the best school in Chicago. Something else.

Got it? Got that undeniable fact that you absolutely know? Okay?

How do you know it?

How do you know what you know? Can you trace where you learned it? And, most importantly, how do you know that it is true?

For most things, it's easy enough to trace back to how you know what you know. Your parents may have told you why you look both ways before you cross the street and your third grade teacher may have told you how the water isn't actually blue and why the sky is. The crossing the street thing is simple enough. You look both ways because in a game of chicken between pedestrians and cars, the cars always win. The sky is blue thing is a bit harder but to call it into question you end up questioning the whole of science and that's a giant enough headache to completely forget about.

But take Shakespeare, for instance. Shakespeare is basically this amazing literature dude who died a long time ago and left us with all of these plays and sonnets and whatnot for english and lit teachers to assign to you today. (Well no but let's go with it for the time being, shall we?) Let's say you think, like a lot of others, that Shakespeare was the greatest playwright of his time and still outrank everyone else who has come after him. Let's say you think that he's moving and brilliant. How do you know that?

One might say that you know that because your teachers have been telling you so since the seventh grade. One might say it's because of all of these elements that you can find and point out in his writing. But how you know about the elements and how they apply to him? From your teachers, right? And how do you know that your teachers are correct? How do you know that you're just making mountains out of molehills in order to fill up a fifty minute period of time?

I say that I don't know anything for sure. Knowing consists of inalienable facts. And everything can have doubt and everything can be wrong. I don't know if what I know is true. I'm just guessing at life. I don't know it because I'm not sure it's true.

0 A Distinct Buzzing...

"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."
- Friedrich Nietzche

It's funny to think of the fact that everything that has ever been synonyms with fly has been annoying. Flies are these insects that buzz around the back of your head, filling your ears with their nonsense. It makes sense that a gadfly would be someone who spent their time buzzing around, filling others with questions they don't even want answered.

And as all insects and everything else in the world, the gadfly has evolved into what we know as the modern fly.

Modern day slavery gadflies are in a higher abundance and are just as written off as they once were. They are dismissed and lumped together with the conspiracy theorists and the other insanes out there that we love to ignore. They are everywhere you look and while their presumed credibility issn't great, they are gaining attention in the various forms of the media.

I'm talking about us, the bloggers of the internet. Who better else to ask their questions, tell others how to live their lives, and more? Who else criticizes other in the name of "bettering the world"? Who else yells at us every day to go against all we know, to drop everything you believe in and pelisse in something else? And who, really, is more irritating in the world?

The bloggers of the internet are constantly locked in a war between themselves and what they believe is everyone else but is also themselves. Governments constantly try to shut them down and shut them up for their blasphemous words and thoughts.

But try as some might, you can't censor the Internet. Bloggers will continue on, flitting here and there, and others will try to swat them. It's the way of the world, you see.

0 It's the Issue of Diluted Lemonade...

"But I say: 'Why invite stress in?' Stop studying strife and learn to live 'the unexamined life'."
- "Dancing through Life" from Wicked: The Musical

I won't segue in this time with a long winded introduction, with the history of philosophy and human questions and life styles and quotes and general rambling and the like. Not this time, I just won't do that. For once I'll be getting straight to the point. Which may or may not happen again. I wouldn't count on it.

[/not so hidden introduction and stalling]

I'm not one to say whether or not your life is worth living. I don't think that is my place, or the one of anyone else for that matter. How you want to life your life is your business. If you want to live ignorant, then that is your choice. There are quite a few reasons to live an ignorant life and they are all valid. It is inherently more blissful. For me, it's just that an examined life is one of much better quality that I'd absolutely choose the examined life over bliss.

With a life without questions, the world is stagnant. Questions lead to change, which may be why one would prefer a life without them. I get it: change can be scary. Really scary. Change is this unknowable variable that can be negative or positive. It's incredibly unstable and can be quite unblissful.

Questions can lead to knowledge and as much as we want to, you can't unknow something once you know.   They can lead to terrible, dangerous, powerful things that you have no business knowing and won't even have the option to reverse. Asking questions can be a worse gamble than playing the lottery.

And for some reason, I think that's what makes it all worth it. The fact that you may not like the answer you get makes the knowledge all the more valuable. You're not guaranteed to like all of the answers in life. But  still, I'd like to hear them.

The answers can be terrifying, complicated, and down right scary but the clarity and satisfaction that I receive when a question of mine is answered surpasses that fear. One can get so much more out of life when they squeeze every drop out with a question mark. Questions lead to the aforementioned change and change can be as good as it can be bad. The greater the risk, the greater the reward.

There is nothing wrong with knowing. No one should be judged for being "enlightened". That's not how it works. On the other hand, you should not be judged for not knowing. It doesn't work that way either. It's a slippery slope, either side, and not everyone has the equipment to scale the sides. You cannot penalize a person for that.

It's just up to you if you want watered down lemonade or a pitcher of vodka. I don't imagine either one being very pleasant. But I'll take the pitcher, thank you very much.

5 Dearly Beloved, We Have Gathered Here...

"Funerals are for the living."
- John Green, The Fault in our Stars

Once, in her biology class, the teacher started the year by telling the students that someone was going to say "orgasm" instead of "organism", just as someone did every year. The students did not believe her. Sydney did not believe her. Needless to say (for you may have heard it from someone else), Sydney was the one to say it during a presentation on genetically altered food. Also needless to be said (but will be said regardless), she had yet to live it down, nor did she expect to. She took it in stride, tried to forget about it, and avoided the subject of biology like the plague. It didn't really work out for her.

But that's how most things went. At least for Sydney. But she joined in on the laughter because really, the situation was funny.

If something had to be said about her, it had to be that while she was not nice, she was not cruel. While she was not selfish, she chose herself when it mattered to her. She was more full of questions than answers. She did not handle failure well, yet she was accustomed to it. She preferred anonymity but was too loose-lipped for it. She rambled on and on and had ideas for miles.

She blogged incredibly too much.

No. Seriously. Incredibly too much.

Rather than believe that everyone is beautiful (because beauty is subjective and crap), she believed that no one has the right to make you feel ugly. She believed that we were mere mortals foolishly trying to understand a language not meant for our ears or lips. She believed in many infinities and not caring because there's a long run. She believed in reading for fun and discussing with people you don't know and the importance of moments to yourself and playing video games even though you're bad at them.

She was attached to her laptop and her iPod and lived an only child kind of life. Which may be why she tried so hard when it came to her friends.

And tried she did. She tried and tried and tried and if she succeeded with her friends and with the ones she cared about, then it was all worth.

As long as she did that, as long as she questioned people and gave them something to think about and filled in the empty spaces of silence, as long as she wrote and imagined and thought her thoughts for herself, she'd die happy.

Not quite sure who is to say she did.