accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life.
Frankl discovered that while the body grows according to what it consumes, the soul grows by the measure of love it pours out.
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing—the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
One winter morning, Frankl was with a group of other prisoners digging a trench in icy ground. The sky was gray, the rags they wore were gray, their faces were gray. He began conversing, silently, in his head, with his beloved wife, even though she was somewhere outside the camp and might have already been dead. He scratched at the ground for hours while internally declaring his love for his wife. Suddenly a strange feeling came over him:
I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose.
At that moment, a light went on in a distant farmhouse.
The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong; she was there.
A bird flew down silently and perched in front of him. They gazed at one another.
For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understand how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.
Frankl said that this was the first time he understood the words “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of infinite glory.” He spent the rest of his long life arguing that human beings’ primary motive is not for money or even happiness, but for meaning. We are driven above all to understand the purpose of our lives. Once that is understood even the most miserable conditions cannot upend inner peace.
Frankl came to realize that it didn’t even matter if his beloved was gone from this world. It was the pouring forth of love that was salvific. He found, in the course of his research in the camp, that the prisoners who died quickly of disease or some breakdown were those who had nothing outside the camp that they were committed to. But those who survived had some external commitment that they desired and pushed toward, whether it was a book they felt called to write or a wife they were compelled to come back to.
One day in the concentration camp, he met a young woman, ill and dying in the infirmary. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told him. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.”
She was lonely in her deathbed, but, she told him, she had befriended the only living creature she could see, a chestnut tree just outside her window. “This tree is the only friend I have in my loneliness,” she told Frankl. She said she often talked to the tree. Startled, Frankl didn’t know how to respond, but eventually asked if the tree talked back to her. She said that it did. It said: “I am here—I am here—I am life, eternal life.” That transcendent connection with eternal life explained the young woman’s tranquility and good cheer in the face of death.
“Bless you, prison,” the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago. “Bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the