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. 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
