Sublime

He wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

The prisoner passed from the first to the second phase; the phase of relative apathy, in which he achieved a kind of emotional death.

“Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.”

As Viktor Frankl points out in Man’s Search for Meaning,

This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love.

The meager pleasures of camp life provided a kind of negative happiness—“freedom from suffering” as Schopenhauer put it—and even that in a relative way only.

Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl describes our attitudes and reactions as being the last of our human freedoms.