If memory serves me correctly—which often it fails to do—I have not read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Before I get into more about that book, though, it occurs to me that a non-memory, such as I claim about Frankl’s book, is contrary to logic…or otherwise wrong-headed. With that detour out of the way, I’ll return to Frankl’s book. I want to read it…or listen to an audio-book version. References to the book and quotations extracted from it fascinate me. The search for purpose or meaning in which Frankl observed Nazi concentration camp prisoners were engaged is, I think, the same one that has controlled so much of my thinking for most of my life. Years ago, I wrote that the intensity of my own search has diminished over the years, but has never disappeared. I think I was wrong; it did not diminish, it simply changed. To this day, the search for purpose and meaning—something to make my life complete—continues. Perhaps reading Frankl’s book will help me uncover what has eluded me all these years. But thoughts I recorded the year before I left Dallas say otherwise, as indicated by these words I wrote, suggesting, hoping:
“…we can minimize the void. But we can never completely erase it. Yet we keep looking. We keep hoping. And maybe that’s what keeps us moving along, shuffling and clucking and struggling against knowing what we don’t wish to know.“
Maybe we really do not wish to find an answer to the question of meaning. Maybe meaning and purpose are just artificial ideas to which we cling in our efforts to stave off despair.
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Another grey mourning. Nearly-invisible oak and pine branches tinged with a sorrowful, dull silver—an attempt by Mother Nature to hide the bleak skies beyond the tree tops. Why would she hide what enshrouds us…? Ah, is she trying to protect us from knowing that which we do not wish to know?
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Most of my thoughts are re-treads. Maybe all of them are over-used and worn slick to the point of being dangerous. Dredged up from massive piles of used ideas left long ago to decompose into useless chunks of incoherent understanding and abandoned theories. Only by looking back in time, when my creativity still had a breath left, can I find any originality. Even then, though, I have to question whether they were authentically mine. Too many lives have begun and ended in the millennia leading up to today for anyone to believe, earnestly, in innovation. I am not alone in plagiaristic thinking. That is my only defense; I belong to a species of unintentional plagiarists. If I were charged with homicide, absent intent, I might be convicted of negligent homicide. How would my conviction read if the charge had been unintentional plagiarist? Negligent plagiarism?
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I have been up since well before six. I would return to bed to sleep for a while, except I have to leave for another radiation treatment in about an hour. And another one tomorrow; that one’s a make-up Saturday. Ach. I feel like I’m living through Ground Hog Day every day.
