~心靈的花園~

Wednesday, May 01, 2002

Existential Despair

Tonight I came across something really intriguing...
Existential despair... tends to sprout from the soil of excess. Why?
Why do more people commit suicide in San Francisco, the most beautiful city in America, than in any other city? (In Europe, the suicide capital is Salzburg, Austria.)
Why is it that a man riding a good commuter train from Larchmont to New York, whose needs and drives are satisfied, who has a good home, loving wife and family, good job, who enjoys unprecedented "cultural and recreational facilities," often feels bad without knowing why?
... despair arises out of circumstances of plenty rather than deprivation.
... As Viktor Frankl explains in
Man's Search for Meaning,
the victims of the concentration camps, he among them, did not dare succumb to meaninglessness, for only an enduring faith in meaning kept them alive. Existential despair did not germinate in the hell holes of Auschwitz or Siberia but rather in the cafes of Paris, the coffee shops of Copenhagen, the luxury palaces of Beverly Hills. After a trip into Eastern Europe during the Cold War, novelist Philip Roth reported, "In the West everything goes and nothing matters. While in the East, nothing goes and everything matters."
~ From Ecclesiastes: The End of Wisdom.
In "The Bible Jesus Read", p. 151.This is the paradox.

by jojoju at 9:54 AM |