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To the others of us, the mediocre and the half-hearted, the words of Bismarck could be applied: “Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.”

In camp, a small time unit, a day, for example, filled with hourly tortures and fatigue, appeared endless. A larger time unit, perhaps a week, seemed to pass very quickly. My comrades agreed when I said that in camp a day lasted longer than a week. How paradoxical was our time-experience!

On entering camp a change took place in the minds of the men. With the end of uncertainty there came the uncertainty of the end. It was impossible to foresee whether or when, if at all, this form of existence would end.

Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.

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 set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.

The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.

I do not at all see in the bestseller status of my book an achievement and accomplishment on my part but rather an expression of the misery of our time: if hundreds of thousands of people reach out for a book whose very title promises to deal with the question of a meaning to life, it must be a question that burns under their fingernails.

Finally, Frankl’s most enduring insight, one that I have called on often in my own life and in countless counseling situations: Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.

The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.

Clearly, many prisoners who desperately wanted to live did die, some from disease, some in the crematoria. But Frankl’s concern is less with the question of why most died than it is with the question of why anyone at all survived.

He describes poignantly those prisoners who gave up on life, who had lost all hope for a future and were inevitably the first to die. They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for.

Several times in the course of the book, Frankl approvingly quotes the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”

From the author’s afterword:

That was in 1968. I have trod the path that leads there often in the years since, and I can think of no better place to spend one's days; the water is still sweet, and the fish still swim.
S.K.
I will holler you home.

She waited. For what, she didn't know. There was nothing. There was a sense of something. She lifted a hand as if to wave, then dropped it again, as if embarrassed. She smiled a little and one tear fell down her cheek, unnoticed. "I love you, honey. Everything the same.”

But hey, what the smuck. She had a place to hang her hat and a good car to drive; she had rags for the bod and shoes for the feet.



[2/2]

Scott had dreamed awake, sometimes brilliantly— but that had been his talent and his job. For Lisey Landon, one world was more than enough, although she suspected she might always harbor a bone-lonely place in her heart for that other one, where she had seen the sun setting in its house of thunder while the moon rose in its house of silver silence.


[1/2]

He introduced himself as Deputy Andy Clutterbuck and shook Lisey's hand.


———

Clutterbuck is back!!

Babyluv: If you need an anchor to hold your place in the world—not Boo'ya Moon but the one we shared, use the african. You know how to get it back. Kisses—at least a thousand, Scott P.S. Everything the same. I love you.

And I do fall, but only a little, only a couple of feet, and only, I think, because I believed I would. So much about Boo'ya Moon is about simple belief; there, seeing really is believing, at least some of the time…and as long as you don't wander too far into the woods and get lost.


[2/2]

I have just a second to think I'll fall, but I don't care, anything's better than hiding under the bed and seeing the stranger wearing my Daddy's face look under and see me looking back, cornered; anything's better than seeing the bad-gunky stranger who owns him now.


[1/2]

"I always loved you, Scott," she told the empty study. Or perhaps it was the sleeping books she told. "You and your everlasting mouth. I was your gal pal. Wasn't I?"

He claimed that for him, writing a book was like finding a brilliantly colored string in the grass and following it to see where it might lead. Sometimes the string broke and left you with nothing. But sometimes—if you were lucky, if you were brave, if you persevered—it brought you to a treasure. And the treasure was never the money you got for the book; the treasure was the book.


[2/2]

She didn't believe Scott had exactly planned all this; he didn't even plan his books, as complex as some of them were. Plotting them, he said, would take out all the fun.


[1/2]

She had just kidnapped her supposedly catatonic sister from one of central Maine's finer nuthouses, for God's sweet sake.


——-

Stephen King, I love your strange way of crafting brand new sentences lol

“Don't listen to what he says. Be smart and listen to what I'm saying. My husband left me twenty million dollars. With that kind of money, if I decide to ass-fuck you, you'll spend the next three years shitting blood from a crouch. Got it?"

If people were going to look at her lips— and she thought they might—she'd do better giving them something to look at than trying to cover up what couldn't be hidden.

Two things have tied him to the earth and saved him from the long boy. His writing is one. The other has a waist he can put his arms around and an ear into which he can whisper.

"There's a place. We called it Boo'ya Moon, I forget why. It's mostly pretty."

You're good for the ones you love. You want to be good for the ones you love, because you know that your time with them will end up being too short, no matter how long it is.