From “Man’s Search for Meaning: The Classic Tribute to Hope from the Holocaust” by Viktor E. Frankl
This book brings us into the very heart of Viktor Frankl’s profound assessment of the human condition, of human nature as he had experienced at its most threatened and bewildered. He recalls how, at the end of a night of slave labour, ‘my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, sa her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise. From this vision he came to a powerful conclusion: ‘I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfilment.