Live as is you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now. (Viktor Frankl)
I started a new reading of this book. The last time I had read this book was on october 2019. I feel that with every passing day I change and it is a different experience to read a book the second or the third time and watch how my impressions have modified. I also felt grateful to my older self who always wrote down the month and year when I started and finished reading a book.
This book is more of a personal essay about the meaning of life. How can we cope with existential dread? Are we truly victims of our environment and upbringing? What can we do in order to feel that we have agency in our lives as social and financial pressures come upon us?
Today I just want to present you a couple of creative photographs I have tried to make for this book.
I also did a short intro film for it as well.
https://youtube.com/shorts/oyUYM9SFPk4?si=DybLmjim6SDRag0H
I have already made a review of this book and also have an older post about it.
By adding a red candle and sweets I have tried to depict the idea of trying to find the sweetness of life in any bitter experience. The concetration camp was a gloomy place to be at, yet Viktor Frankl managed to make a fine observation of those who managed to endure the conditions: the idea that there is a meaning to life even in the worst environment.
As logotherapy teaches, there are three main avenues on which one arrives at meaning in life. The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed. The second is by experiencing something or encountering someone; in other words, meaning can be found not only in work but also in love. Edith Weisskopf-Joelson observed in this context that the logotherapeutic ‘notion that experiencing can be as valuable as achieving is therapeutic because it compensates for our one-sided emphasis on the external world of achievement at the expense of the internal world of experience;. Most important , however, is the third avenue to meaning in life: even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph. (Viktor Frankl)
