Yes To Life In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

I am unspeakably tired, unspeakably sad, unspeakably lonely…. In the camp, you really believed you had reached the low point of life – and then, when you came back, you were forced to see that things had not lasted, everything that had sustained you had been destroyed, that at the time when you had become human again, you could sink even deeper into an even more bottomless suffering. Maybe there is nothing else left but to weep a little and to search through the Psalms. Maybe you will laugh at me, maybe you will be angry with me; but I do not contradict myself in the least; I take back nothing of my old affirmation of life when I experience the things I have described. On the contrary: if I had not had this rock-solid positive attitude to life, what would have become of me during these weeks, indeed those months in the concentration camp? But I see things in another dimension now. Increasingly, I realise that life is so infinitely meaningful that even in suffering and even in failure there still has to be a meaning.4