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Exile of The Angels
“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.”
— Edward W. Said — Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 2002.
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WHAT IS TO GIVE LIGHT MUST ENDURE BURNING
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian doctor. As a Jew under Nazi occupation Frankl found himself in a concentration camp. It is hard to think of a worse set of circumstances, but Frankl wrote that, even in that unspeakable suffering, he was able to choose to live his life in a meaningful way.
Frankl wrote:
“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”
And:
“What is to give light must endure burning.”
I hear that last line as Frankl affirming the human condition. Life is a kind of combustion. We cannot help but burn. Even if we could snuff out our painful burning we would deny our purpose by holding back from life’s…
