Chapter One
Am I Worthy of Teaching Viktor Frankl's Masterpiece?
When you teach Viktor Frankl’s beloved masterpiece Man’s Search for Meaning, as I do, at the college level and you have been doing so for over a decade, you have certain responsibilities. I presume you don’t have to be an all-out saint like Viktor Frankl, risking your life to help others the way he did in the concentration camps, but you should be moving in the right direction on the scale of positive attitude and meaning, flourishing in your work, your maturity, and your service to others.
And there lies the problem. Having taught Man’s Search for Meaning for over ten years, I should have absorbed some of the book’s powerful wisdom and its essential goodness, but I feel like the same desperate soul that I was before I taught it, which is disturbing for many reasons not the least of which I feel like a fraud and a hypocrite.
I have fallen short of being “worthy of suffering,” of being a free agent, someone who is more than a “plaything of circumstance.” And knowing this brings me shame.
Often I imagine Frankl perched in heaven tsktsking me as he watches me bloviate his book’s principles to my students, for he would see me as a confident, capable speaker but someone whose life violates his moral imperative: We make an “inner decision” to choose under any circumstances our attitude toward life and we must choose to grasp our highest moral behavior and as a result make ourselves worthy of our suffering. But my attitude is horrendous, toxic, cynical, fearful, desperate, and at times even nihilistic.
If I may illustrate, I was at this college party back when I was in my early twenties and an attractive girl who knew me from Introduction to Art class walked up to me, not because she liked me, but because she needed to get something off her chest. She said, “I need to tell you something. You’re not the kind of person people gravitate to. You have this face that makes people feel stupid and you look like you’re always inhaling foul odors.”
Then keeping her head turned toward me, she walked backwards across the room and put her arm around this evenly tanned guy who was conspicuously free of my sour expression and she curled her lips as if to say, “See you later, loser.” And to add to the insult, she made this scrunched-up face at me as if being in my presence had afflicted her with a dark cloud of stench and now she was leaving my stench-infested world and entering a more fragrant universe where everyone smiled at each other because everyone smelled like fresh lilac.
I was stunned by the raw disdain she expressed toward me and I was equally stunned by the truth that I didn’t want to hear: I do have a way of looking at people like I’m judging them severely and that I’m smelling foul odors from them as if I disapprove of their entire existence. And sometimes I really do feel that way, but the expression more often than not has little to do with judging others but more with a sense of general desperation that consumes me. I am desperate for answers about the problems of death and existence that always seem in short supply. I am desperate for courage and confidence and identity, but these things also remain scarce. My face therefore isn’t of a man disapproving of others but of a man who disapproves of life itself.
And this disapproving, grumpy face of mine evidences a man who does not embrace the robust attitude toward life that Frankl says we must assert as we brave our way through life’s challenges.
I teach Viktor Frankl’s masterpiece, but I am the embodiment of the book’s antithesis. The irony of it all is not funny. It is killing me.
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