Have you ever wondered why people continue to fight to survive in the harshest conditions? As I was reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, he discusses how having a personal meaning for life motivates people to stay alive even in the harshest conditions like concentration camps.
As a psychologist and concentration camp survivor, Viktor is able to reflect on his time in the camps to understand what motivated people to survive against all odds.
Humans can endure far more than you can imagine. Unfortunately, concentration camps showed how much people can survive and what people are willing to do to each other.
There’s this fascinating line from the book that talks about how all the doctors and medical professionals found out that the textbooks lied to them. It turned out that they really could stay awake longer or could do more work with less food and water than they ever thought was possible.
It’s a terrible thing to have experienced. People don’t want to live through hardship or see how much suffering they can endure. None of us want a life that forces us to be resilient or show strength.
But I also think we are all far more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. When push comes to shove, we will find a way to survive.
Finding their motivation
Concentration camps show the extreme of what humans have gone through, which is why it was an interesting place to see why people continued to fight to stay alive. It provided an opportunity to see what truly motivated people to survive.
Sometimes people discuss how the pursuit of pleasure is the meaning or focus of life. But in a concentration camp, there’s no longer any pleasure. So pleasure can no longer be a viable reason for why people live and survive.
As Viktor is a psychologist and concentration camp survivor, he was able to take an intimate look and reflect on what helped people survive and why some were able to persist through it all.
You need meaning to survive
As mentioned above, Viktor is a psychologist and after surviving the concentration camps he came up with his own theory about life called logotherapy. Logotherapy is a theory that says everyone needs meaning in their life to survive.
Life doesn’t revolve around the pursuit of pleasure or a grand ideal, but rather that everyone needs some kind of meaning in their life.
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Your personal meaning can be anything — a person/relationship, a belief, your work/art/contributions, a higher ideal/religion, etc. There’s no one meaning to life, but everyone has their own. It can be whatever you think is meaningful or brings purpose to your life.
Everyone needs meaning and without it, people often lose the will to live. In the concentration camps, once people lost their focus or meaning, they often lost the will to live. For instance when they lost all hope or all of their family, or if the war didn’t end on the date they expected (maybe because of a dream or some sign), they often became so discouraged they stopped fighting to live.
Viktor talks about how difficult it was to watch people lose hope and their meaning for life. It was obvious when people gave up their will to live.
But there were many who had a reason to keep fighting. Each person’s reason or meaning was unique but everyone had something.
Meaning is completely personal and unique
As mentioned above, your meaning can be anything — a person, a belief, your work/art/contributions, a higher ideal/religion, etc. It’s anything that provides meaning or purpose to your life.
Everyone’s meaning is unique and personal. There is no universal meaning, just a universal need for meaning. Your religion or personal values maybe your personal meaning for life, but that doesn’t apply to everyone.
It think it’s powerful to understand that your meaning for life isn’t the same as everyone else’s. Even if your belief in making the world a better place (or any other value driven purpose) is what gives you meaning and may be the most important part of your life, you likely don’t share that with others. Some people may share a similar meaning to you, but everyone’s meaning is unique and manifests in their own way.
I feel like many disagreements stem from mismatched priorities or the level of importance placed on the topic. You may feel like it’s the most important thing (especially if it directly affects you), whereas others may not place the same value on it or simply value something else more. The difference in value can lead to feeling like others don’t care, but maybe it’s a matter of them caring about other topics more.
Finding your meaning
You need to discover your own meaning, whatever provides you with a purpose. There is no right or wrong meaning to life, nor any singular correct meaning; anything that works for you can be your meaning for life.
If you are unsure of your meaning for life, I would encourage you to take time reflecting on what’s most important to you and why you’re living this life. I personally love journaling, it helps me sort through my thoughts. You can read about the power of journaling and writing in my previous post HERE.
Meanings can also evolve or change throughout your life. It may not stay constant. As you change, grow, and develop, your values and meaning may also change. It’s important to revisit and re-evaluate what gives your life meaning.
The only true danger is when you have no meaning for your life. That’s when people are at the highest risk for giving up completely. If you feel like life is meaningless, please speak to a medical or mental healthcare professional.
Final thoughts
I found this book really interesting. It took the very difficult topic of concentration camps and looked at it through a psychological lens. This was much more a philosophical or psychological book about the importance of having meaning in your life rather than a book purely about concentration camps.
If you’re looking for something purely about the concentration camp experience or World War II, this may not be the right book for you. But if you’re looking for a discussion on the meaning of life and why people fight to stay alive, then this is the right book for you. If you’re interested in why people are able to endure extreme situations and what keeps them motivated, then I would recommend this book.
I think if you approach the book with the right mindset, you can gain so much from it. Personally, I found it sparked a lot of thoughts and reflections on my own life and how others live.
I really appreciated how it emphasized that everyone’s meaning for life is unique rather than trying to justify a universal meaning for life. We’re not all the same and it makes sense that we’d each have our own motivation for life.
This is an excerpt from the short story The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol, translated by Ronald Wilks.
One of them, who was deeply moved, decided he could at least help Akaky Akakievich with some good advice. He told him not to go to the local police officer, since although that gentleman might well recover his overcoat somehow or other in the hope of receiving a recommendation from his superiors, Akaky did not have a chance of getting it out of the police station without the necessary legal proof that the overcoat was really his. The best plan was to apply to a certain Important Person, and this same Important Person, by writing to and contacting the proper people, would get things moving much faster. There was nothing else for it, so Akaky Akakievich decide to go and see this Important Person.
What exactly this Important Person did and what position he held remains a mystery to this day. All we need say is that this Important Person had become important only a short while before, and that until then he had been an unimportant person. However, even now his position was not considered very important if compared with others which were still more important. But you will always come across a certain class of people who consider something unimportant which for other people is in fact important. However, he tried all manners and means of buttressing his importance. For example, he was responsible for introducing the rule that all low-ranking civil servants should be waiting to meet him on the stairs when he arrived at the office; that no one, on any account, could walk straight into his office; and that everything must be dealt with in the strictest order of priority: the collegiate registrar was to report to the provincial secretary who in turn was to report to the titular councillor (or whoever it was he had to report to) so that in this way the matter reached him according to the prescribed procedure. In this Holy Russia of ours everything is infected by a mania for imitation, and everyone apes his superior. I have even heard say that when a certain titular councillor was appointed head of some minor government department he immediately partitioned off a section of his office into a special room for himself, an ‘audience chamber’ as he called it, and made two ushers in uniforms with red collars and gold braid stand outside to open the doors for visitors—even though you would have a job getting an ordinary writing desk into this so-called chamber.
This Important Person’s routine was very imposing and impressive, but nonetheless simple. The whole basis of his system was strict discipline. ‘Discipline, discipline, and … discipline’ he used to say, usually looking very solemnly into the face of the person he was addressing when he had repeated this word for the third time. However, there was really no good reason for this strict discipline, since the ten civil servants or so who made up the whole administrative machinery of his department were all duly terrified of him anyway. If they saw him coming from some way off they would stop what they were doing and stand to attention while the Director went through the office. His normal everyday conversation with his subordinates simply reeked of discipline and consisted almost entirely of three phrases: ‘How dare you? Do you know who you’re talking to? Do you realize who’s standing before you?’
However, he was quite a good man at heart, pleasant to his colleagues and helpful. But his promotion to general’s rank had completely turned his head; he became all mixed up, somehow went off the rails, and just could not cope any more. If he happened to be with someone of equal rank, then he was quite a normal person, very decent in fact and indeed far from stupid in many respects.
But put him with people only one rank lower, and he was really at sea. he would not say a single word, and one felt sorry to see him in such a predicament, all the more so as even he felt that he could have been spending the time far more enjoyably.
One could read this craving for interesting company and conversation in his eyes, but he was always inhibited by the thought: would this be going too far for someone in his position, would this be showing too much familiarity and therefore rather damaging to his status? For these reasons he would remain perpetually silent, producing a few monosyllables from time to time, and as a result acquired the reputation of being a terrible bore. This was the Important Person our Akaky Akakievich went to consult, and he appeared at the worst possible moment—most inopportune as far as he was concerned—but most opportune for the Important Person.
Have you read this story? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
The Overcoat – from a collection of short stories – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
Nikolai Gogol was born in the Ukraine in 1809. Vladimir Nabokov wrote of his work that “after reading Gogol one’s eyes may become gogolized, and one is apt to see bits of his world in the most unexpected places.” He died in 1852 after subjecting himself to a severe regime of fasting. “The Overcoat” and “The Nose” are two of Gogol’s finest works. “The Nose” is a masterpiece of comic art, and “The Overcoat” is considered one of the greatest short stories ever written.
This is a quote from the book If Cats Disappeared From the World by Genki Kawamura, translated by Eric Selland.
Quote by Genki Kawamura, “I wanted to let her know what I was thinking right away, but couldn’t. And strangely enough, it was when I couldn’t speak to her that she was on my mind the most.”
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.
If Cats Disappeared From the World – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
Our narrator’s days are numbered. Estranged from his family, living alone with only his cat Cabbage for company, he was unprepared for the doctor’s diagnosis that he has only months to live. But before he can set about tackling his bucket list, the Devil appears with a special offer: in exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, he can have one extra day of life. And so begins a very bizarre week . . .
Because how do you decide what makes life worth living? How do you separate out what you can do without from what you hold dear? In dealing with the Devil our narrator will take himself – and his beloved cat – to the brink. Genki Kawamura’s If Cats Disappeared from the World is a story of loss and reconciliation, of one man’s journey to discover what really matters in modern life.
This is an excerpt from the book Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
A convenience store is a world of sound. From the tinkle of the door chime to the voices of TV celebrities advertising new products over the in-store cable network, to the calls of the store workers, the beeps of the bar code scanner, the rustle of customers picking up items and placing them in baskets, and the clacking of heels walking around the store. It all blends into the convenience store sound that ceaselessly caresses my eardrums.
I hear the faint rattle of a new plastic bottle rolling into place as a customer takes one out of the refrigerator, and look up instantly. A cold drink is often the last item customers take before coming to the checkout till, and my body responds automatically to the sound. I see a woman holding a bottle of mineral water while perusing the desserts and look back down.
As i arrange the display of newly delivered rice balls, my body picks up information from the multitude of sounds around the store. At this time of day, rice balls, sandwiches, and salads are what sell best. Another part-timer, Sugawara, is over at the other side of the store checking off items with a handheld scanner. I continue laying out the pristine, machine-made food neatly on the shelves of the cold display: in the middle I place two rows of the new flavor, spicy cod roe with cream cheese, alongside two rows of the store’s best-selling flavor, tuna mayonnaise, and then I line the less popular dry bonito shavings in soy sauce flavor next to those. Speed is of the essence, and I barely use my head as the rules ingrained in me issue instructions directly to my body.
Alerted by a faint clink of coins I turn and look over at the cash register. It’s a sound I’m sensitive to, since customers who come just to buy cigarettes or a newspaper often jingle coins in their hand or pocket. And yes: as I’d thought, a man with a can of coffee in one hand, the other hand in his pocket, is approaching the till. I quickly move through the store, slide behind the counter, and stand at the ready so as not to keep him waiting.
“Irasshaimasé! Good morning, sir.”
I bow and take the can of coffee he holds out to me.
“Oh, and a pack of Marlboro menthol Lights.”
“Right away, sir.” I take out a pack of the cigarettes and scan the bar code. “Please confirm your age on the touch screen.”
As he does so, I notice him glance at the hot-food cabinet. I could ask him whether he’d like anything else, but when a customer appears to be dithering over whether or not to buy something, I make a point of taking a step back and waiting.
“And a corn dog.”
“Right away, sir. Thank you.”
I disinfect my hands with alcohol, open the hot cabinet, and take out a corn dog.
“Shall I put the hot food and cold drink in separate bags?”
“Oh no, don’t bother. Together’s fine.”
I put the can of coffee, cigarettes, and corn dog into a small-size bag. Until then the man had been jingling the coins in his pocket, but now he suddenly moves his hand to his breast pocket as though something has just occurred to him. Instantly I deduse that he will use electronic money.
“I’ll pay by Suica.”
“Certainly, sir. Please touch your card here.”
I automatically read the customer’s minutest movements and gaze, and my body acts reflexively in response. My ears and eyes are important sensors to catch their every move and desire. Taking the utmost care not to cause the customer any discomfort by observing him or her too closely, I swiftly move my hands according to whatever signals I pick up.
“Your receipt, sir. Tank you for your custom!”
“Thanks,” he says, taking his receipt and leaving.
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” I say with a bow to the woman next in the queue. “Irasshaimasé. Good morning!”
The morning period is passing normally in the brightly lit box of the convenience store, I feel. visible outside the windows, polished free of fingerprints, are the figures of people rushing by. It is the start of another day, the time when the world wakes up and the cogs of society begin to move. I am one of those cogs, going round and round. I have become a functioning part of the world, rotating in the time of day called morning.
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
Convenience Store Woman – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what they should say, and she copies her coworkers’ style of dress and speech patterns so that she can play the part of a normal person.
However, eighteen years later, at age 36, she is still in the same job, has never had a boyfriend, and has only few friends. She feels comfortable in her life, but is aware that she is not living up to society’s expectations and causing her family to worry about her. When a similarly alienated but cynical and bitter young man comes to work in the store, he will upset Keiko’s contented stasis—but will it be for the better?
Sayaka Murata brilliantly captures the atmosphere of the familiar convenience store that is so much part of life in Japan. With some laugh-out-loud moments prompted by the disconnect between Keiko’s thoughts and those of the people around her, she provides a sharp look at Japanese society and the pressure to conform, as well as penetrating insights into the female mind. Convenience Store Woman is a fresh, charming portrait of an unforgettable heroine that recalls Banana Yoshimoto, Han Kang, and Amélie.
This is an excerpt from the book Moving Parts by Prabda Yoon (ปราบดา หยุ่น), translated by Mui Poopoksakul.
“Can I hold your hand?” Just last Saturday evening, the boy had gone to see a movie, and he’d picked up the line from a cutesy love scene.
The girl sat there awhile, charmed by the idea, before she gave her answer with enthusiasm: “Sure, take it.”
She gave him her left hand.
He took it nervously.
And then the girl sprinted off, disappearing into the luscious glow of the evening sun, leaving the boy to sit there in a tangle of emotions, staring at the third hand he held in his right hand. No one had ever given him their hand so nonchalantly before. Happy? Sure, he could say he was happy, because he’d had a secret crush on the girl for months. Being in possession of her hand surely meant that he’d managed to chisel away a few layers of brick from the wall separating their personal spaces.
But the happiness dissipated in no time, replaced instead by anxiety.
He didn’t know how to behave toward the girl’s hand no that he had it.
As the dusky sky set in, the boy decided to go home.
“Hurry up and have a shower, sweetie. I’ve got dinner ready,” his mother caught sight of him coming in just after she heard the front door shut. She was standing in the kitchen, peeling yellow-fleshed oranges. Her eyes toggled back and forth very quickly from her son to the fruit, but she was eagle-eyed enough to spot the foreign object in his hand. She immediately did a double take, turning her head with a whoosh. “And whose hand have you got there, huh?”
“A friend from school’s, Mom.” Although his account was not precisely truthful, it didn’t quite fall under the category of a lie either. But when he added out of nervousness that “sh—he lent it to me”, well, now he was toeing a mighty fine line between sin and innocence.
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
Moving Parts – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
Surreal and puncturing short stories from the Thai master of the form.
In a pink-walled motel, a teenage prostitute brings a grown man to tears. A love-struck young boy holds the dismembered hand of his crush, only to find himself the object of a complex ménage à trois. A naked body falls from the window of a twenty-story building, while two female office-workers offer each other consolation in the elevator…
In these wry and unsettling stories, Prabda Yoon once again illuminates something of the strangeness of modern cultural life in Bangkok. Disarming the reader with surprising charm, intensity and delicious horror, he explores what it means to have a body, and to interact with those of others.
This is an excerpt from the book The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith.
The receptionist greets her, recognizing her from previous visits. She closes her dripping umbrella and secures the tie around it, then sits down on a long wooden bench. While she waits for the doctor to come down from the consultation room, she turns to look at the zelkova tree which stands in the hospital’s front garden. The tree is clearly very old, easily four hundred years. On bright days it would spread its countless branches and let the sunlight scintillate its leaves, seemingly communicating something to her. Today, a day sodden and stupefied with rain, it is reticent, and keeps its thoughts unspoken. The old bark on its lower part is dark as a drenched evening, and the leaves tremble silently on the twigs as the raindrops batter down on them. And she sees her sister’s face, flickering like a ghostly after-image overlaid on the silent scene.
She closes her bloodshot eyes for a long time before opening them again. The tree fills her field of vision, still silent, keeping its own counsel. Still she cannot sleep. It’s been three months straight now, three months of getting by snatching pockets of sleep here and there, never more than an hour at any one time. Yeong-hye’s voice, the forest with the black rain falling, and her own face with the blood trickling from her eye, shiver the long night into fragments like potsherds.
Usually, when she has given up on trying to wring any more sleep out of the night, it is around three in the morning. She washes her face, brushes her teeth, prepares some side dishes, cleans and tidies every corner of the house, and still the clock goes as slow as ever, the shifting of the hands like the almost comically suspended movements of some ponderous dance. In the end she goes into his room and listens to some of the records he left behind, or puts her hand on her back and sins herself around the room as he once had, or curls up in the bathtub with her clothes on and even feels, for the first time, as though he mightn’t have been so incomprehensible after all. He probably just hadn’t had the energy to take his clothes off, simple as that. He simply can’t have had the energy to adjust the water temperature and take a shower. It struck her that this narrow, concave space was, oddly enough, cosier than anywhere else in the entire thirty-two-p’yong apartment.
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
The Vegetarian – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more ‘plant-like’ existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares. In South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye’s decision is a shocking act of subversion. Her passive rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, leading her bland husband to self-justified acts of sexual sadism.
His cruelties drive her towards attempted suicide and hospitalisation. She unknowingly captivates her sister’s husband, a video artist. She becomes the focus of his increasingly erotic and unhinged artworks, while spiralling further and further into her fantasies of abandoning her fleshly prison and becoming – impossibly, ecstatically – a tree.
Fraught, disturbing and beautiful, The Vegetarian is a novel about modern day South Korea, but also a novel about shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.
Note, you may want to check trigger warnings before reading this book. You can find some details on the book’s trigger warnings here.
This is an excerpt from the book If Cats Disappeared From the World by Genki Kawamura, translated by Eric Selland.
If cats disappeared from the world, how would the world be different? What wold be gained and what would be lost in a world without cats?
I remembered what my mother said a long time ago:
“Cats and humans have been partners for over ten thousand years. And what you realize when you’ve lived with a cat for a long time is that we may think we own them, but that’s not the way it is. They simply allow us the pleasure of their company.”
Cabbage was curled up and asleep. I lay down beside him and gazed at his face. Such a peaceful face. Never in his wildest dreams wold he ever imagine a world where he had disappeared. I wouldn’t be surprised if he woke up at this very moment, speaking like a gentleman and demanding to be fed. But as I stared at his sleeping face I could also imagine him saying like a faithful friend, “I would gladly disappear for you, sir.”
On the one hand, they say that only humans have a concept of death. Cats don’t see it coming. It doesn’t cause them fear and anxiety like it does humans. And then humans end up keeping cats as pets, despite our angst over mortality, even though we know that the cat will die long before we do, causing the owner untold grief.
But then again, human beings can never grieve their own death. Death is always something that happens to others around them. When you boil it down, the death of a cat isn’t so different from the death of a human. When I thought about it this way I finally understood why it is that we humans keep cats as pets. there’s a limit to how well we know ourselves. We don’t know what we look like to others, and we can’t know our own future, and we can’t know what our own death will be like. And that’s why we need cats. It’s just like my mother said. Cats don’t need us. It’s human beings who need cats.
As these thoughts were going round and round in my brain I suddenly felt a sharp pain in the right side of my head.
Feeling powerless I curled up in bed, trembling, just like Lettuce when he was dying. I felt so small and helpless in this body of mine, this body no dominated by death. I felt a heavy weight pressing down on my chest.
The pain in my head was getting worse. I went into the kitchen and took two painkillers, washed them down with water, and then went back to bed. I fell into a deep sleep.
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
If Cats Disappeared From the World – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
Our narrator’s days are numbered. Estranged from his family, living alone with only his cat Cabbage for company, he was unprepared for the doctor’s diagnosis that he has only months to live. But before he can set about tackling his bucket list, the Devil appears with a special offer: in exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, he can have one extra day of life. And so begins a very bizarre week . . .
Because how do you decide what makes life worth living? How do you separate out what you can do without from what you hold dear? In dealing with the Devil our narrator will take himself – and his beloved cat – to the brink. Genki Kawamura’s If Cats Disappeared from the World is a story of loss and reconciliation, of one man’s journey to discover what really matters in modern life.
This is a quote from the book Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke.
Quote by Rainer Maria Rilke, “A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.”
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.
Letter to a Young Poet – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
A hugely influential collection for writers and artists of all kinds, Rilke’s profound and lyrical letters to a young friend advise on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself.
This is an excerpt from the book Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke.
You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me that. You have asked others, before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you worry when certain editors turn your efforts down. Now (since you have allowed me to offer you advice) let me ask you to give up all that. You are looking to the outside, and that above all you should not be doing now. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night’s quietest hour: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if it should be affirmative, if it is given to you to respond to this serious question with a loud and simple ‘I must’, then construct your life according to this necessity; your life right into its most inconsequential and slightest hour must become a sign and witness of this urge. Then approach nature. Then try, like the first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose. Don’t write love poems; avoid at first those forms which are too familiar and habitual: they are the hardest, for you need great maturity and strength to produce something of your own in a domain where good and sometimes brilliant examples have been handed down to us in abundance. For this reason, flee general subjects and take refuge in those offered by your own day-to-day life; depict your sadnesses and desires, passing thoughts and faith in some kind of beauty – depict all this with intense, quiet, humble sincerity and make use of whatever you find about you to express yourself, the images from your dreams and the things in your memory. If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place. And even if you were in a prison whose walls did not let any of the sounds of the world outside reach your senses – would you not have your childhood still, this marvellous, lavish source, this treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention towards that. Attempt to raise the sunken sensations of this distant past; your self will become the stronger for it, your loneliness will open up and become a twilit dwelling in which the noise other people make is only heard far off. And if from this turn inwards, from the submersion in your own world, there come verses, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses. Nor will you attempt to interest magazines in these bits of work: for in them you will see your beloved natural possessions, a piece, and a voice, of your life. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. The verdict on it lies in this nature of its origin: there is no other. For this reason, my dear Sir, the only advice I have is this: to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs; at its source you will find the answer to the questions of whether you have to write. Accept this answer as it is, without seeking to interpret it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then assume this fate and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking after the rewards that may come from outside. For he who creates must be a world of his own and find everything within himself and in the natural world that he has elected to follow.
But perhaps even after this descent into yourself and into your solitariness you will have to give up the idea of becoming a poet (the feeling that one could live without writing is enough, as I said, to make it something on should never do). But even then, to have taken pause in the way I am asking you to will not have been in vain. Whatever happens, your life will find its own paths from that point on, and that they may be good, productive and far-reaching is something I wish for you more than I can say.
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
Letter to a Young Poet – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
A hugely influential collection for writers and artists of all kinds, Rilke’s profound and lyrical letters to a young friend advise on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself.
This is an excerpt from the book Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
Deep in the mountains of Akishina where Granny and Grandpa live, fragments of night linger even at midday.
As we wound our way up steep hairpin bends, I gazed out the window at the swaying trees, at the undersides of the leaves so swollen they looked as though they would burst. That was where the pitch-black darkness was. I always felt an urge to reach out to that blackness, the color of outer space.
Next to me, Mom was rubbing my sister’s back.
“Are you okay, Kise? These mountain roads are so steep, no wonder you’re feeling carsick.”
Dad gripped the steering wheel, saying nothing. He was driving slowly to keep the car as steady as he possibly could, glancing anxiously at Kise in the rearview mirror.
I was eleven and in year five of elementary school. I could take care of myself. Looking out of the window at the fragments of the universe was the best way to avoid getting carsick. I’d worked that out when I was eight and hadn’t been sick on this road since. My sister was two years older than me, but she was still just a child and wouldn’t survive the journey without Mom’s help.
As we drove up and up around endless bends, ears popping, I felt like I was gradually moving toward the sky. Granny’s house is high up, close to the universe.
I hugged my backpack to me. Inside it was my origami magic wand and my magical transformation mirror. At the very top of the backpack was my best friend, Piyyut, who gave me these magical objects. Piyyut can’t speak human since the evil forces put a spell on him, but he’s looking after me so I won’t get carsick.
I hadn’t told my family, but I was a magician, a real one with actual magical powers. I’d met Piyyut in the supermarket by the station when I was six and had just started elementary school. He was right on the edge of the soft toy display and looked as though he was about to be thrown out. I bought him with the money I’d received at New Year’s. Piyyut was the one who’d given me my magical objects and powers. He was from Planet Popinpobopia. The Magic Police had found out that Earth was facing a crisis and had sent him on a mission to save our planet. Since then I’d been using the powers he’d given me to protect the Earth.
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
Earthlings – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
Natsuki isn’t like the other girls. She has a wand and a transformation mirror. She might be a witch, or an alien from another planet. Together with her cousin Yuu, Natsuki spends her summers in the wild mountains of Nagano, dreaming of other worlds. When a terrible sequence of events threatens to part the two children forever, they make a promise: survive, no matter what.
Now Natsuki is grown. She lives a quiet life with her asexual husband, surviving as best she can by pretending to be normal. But the demands of Natsuki’s family are increasing, her friends wonder why she’s still not pregnant, and dark shadows from Natsuki’s childhood are pursuing her. Fleeing the suburbs for the mountains of her childhood, Natsuki prepares herself with a reunion with Yuu. Will he still remember their promise? And will he help her keep it?
