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.