Sunday, December 8, 2013

Quotations - III


"Life of Pi" - an exceptional story-telling of a ship-wreck victim who manages to survive impossible odds with an incredible will, and a curious blend of sound reason and transcendence. Towards the end, there is an interesting dialogue between Pi and his interrogators (and this is where I feel the movie failed to produce the same effect!) where he argues that all amazing experiences indeed go beyond the realms of "the reasonable"! -
So am I! I applied my reason at every moment. Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.
I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.
I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen every day.
We believe what we see....What do you do when you're in the dark?
If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe? ... Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe? ... I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.
"Man's Search For Meaning" is yet another incredibly powerful & inspiring, real story of survival - here are some wonderfully humane assertions from the book -
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
Sigmund Freud once asserted, "Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the "individual differences" did not "blur" but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.
And here's a nice excerpt from a speech delivered by Viktor Frankl himself!