Viktor Frankl exhorts us to find meaning in suffering

We fortunately have access to many of the lectures and talks given by Viktor Frankl after his horrific holocaust experience.  Here's one in which he elaborates on how to find meaning in the face of suffering.

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More on allegories

Plato wrote The Republic, in which we find his perceptive allegory of the cave, in about 380 BC. More recently (2002 AD) the Portuguese Nobelist José Saramago presents a similar allegory in his sardonic and thoughtful novel The Cave. I commend it to you as a contemporary complement to Plato’s allegory. You’ll initially find Saramago’s style challenging, with strong overtones to my eye of both Proust and Joyce.

Ocean State Libraries

Providence Athenaeum

And take another viewing of the 1999 sci-fi film The Matrix. Or screen one of the many animated version of Plato’s cave available on YouTube, 

for example:

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40 portraits in 40 years

NYT
Reporter Susan Minot writes of 40 years of Brown sister portraits:


Throughout this series, we watch these women age, undergoing life’s most humbling experience. While many of us can, when pressed, name things we are grateful to Time for bestowing upon us, the lines bracketing our mouths and the loosening of our skin are not among them. So while a part of the spirit sinks at the slow appearance of these women’s jowls, another part is lifted: They are not undone by it. We detect more sorrow, perhaps, in the eyes, more weight in the once-fresh brows. But the more we study the images, the more we see that aging does not define these women. Even as the images tell us, in no uncertain terms, that this is what it looks like to grow old, this is the irrefutable truth, we also learn: This is what endurance looks like.

View the article and photo series here:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/03/magazine/01-brown-sisters-forty-years.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0


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