Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

Frankl cites Kierkegaard, that the door to happiness always opens outward.

Frankl cites a converging formulation from Rabbi Hillel almost two thousand years ago. The translation I know best goes: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?” For Frankl, this suggests that each of us has our unique life purpose and that serving others ennobles it. The scope and range of our actions matter less than how well we respond to the specific demands of our life circle.

Those who experience, not the arts, but nature, may have a similar response, and also those who experience another human being. Do we not know the feeling that overtakes us when we are in the presence of a particular person and, roughly translates as, The fact that this person exists in the world at all, this alone makes this world, and a life in it, meaningful.

We also do not judge the life history of a particular person by the number of pages in the book that portrays it but only by the richness of the content it contains.

And in spite of everything, no human suffering can be compared to anyone else’s because it is part of the nature of suffering that it is the suffering of a particular person, that it is his or her own suffering—that its “magnitude” is dependent solely on the sufferer, that is, on the person; a person’s solitary suffering is just as unique and individual as is every person.