IN LOVE

IN LOVE

One of the most beautiful and lucid texts I’ve ever read and I would like you to know.

It is an excerpt from one of my favourite books, an extraordinary work: ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, by Dr. Viktor Frankl, and we must get to contextualize it in the story of the author while being a prisoner in the Nazi Auschwitz extermination camp. It goes like:

 

“As we marched stumbling on for miles, slipping on the ice and continually relying on each other, we did not say a word, but we both knew: we were both thinking about our wives. Occasionally, I looked up to heaven and saw pinkish stars diluted at dawn in a morning starting to show a dark band of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining her with uncanny accuracy. I could hear her answering me, saw her smile, her frank friendly look. Real or not, her eyes were brighter than the morning sun. A thought petrified me then: for the first time in my life I understood the truth poured into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. That truth that love is the ultimate and highest goal a man can aspire to. That was when I realized the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought were trying to communicate: The salvation of man is through love and in love… I realized how a man, stripped of everything in this world, can still find happiness –if only for a moment– by contemplating the loved one. When a person is in a situation of utter desolation, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings properly, with dignity, that person can be held in the loving contemplation of the image of the beloved.”

 

I invite you to read this extraordinary work, as it open minds and hearts, and helps to see life from a different perspective.

Best,

Álex

Alex Rovira