Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 5
When I get home I turn the phone off and try to let go of the day. The headphones go on, a podcast, some music, whatever book I’m listening to, and the lid comes off the cold plunge. I set a stopwatch on my phone and prop it against a rolled-up towel set neatly next to my flip flops. The stopwatch starts and I step into the fifty-five-degree water. The cool water around my legs signals to the rest of my body what’s about to come. One minute, then I drop into it. When my breathing slows I relax my head against the inflated rim and settle in.
An empty sky is somehow more interesting; you’re not so much looking at it as you are into it. The northeastern blue fades to purple as far from the setting sun as the universe will allow. Unblemished.
A bright red spot flies across the blue void. It circles, it swoops, it sings. A cardinal. Bright vibrant red. Seemingly without care using the last of the sun’s rays as a spotlight for its end-of-the-day dance. Pristine.
My eyes follow as it perches on a pile of construction debris. Weeds reaching up through the pallet of concrete block and lumber with nails and bolts sticking out at different angles, bent and rusting. A chaotic and unmanaged intrusion on the natural setting.
I thought those words; unblemished, pristine, chaos, intrusion. But I, in the middle of writing a series about labels, refused to apply them. I wouldn’t let them “grow” further into a feeling. They arose easily yet took some effort to rid myself of. I was determined not to become attached to them. I attempted to observe the events as well as myself reacting to them.
By this point my nervous system has dropped and I’m as relaxed as I’m going to be submerged in cold water. My breathing has become steady and smooth. Just me in a container of water and my flightless companion sitting on a pile of rubble. Words or labels aren’t necessary here. We are in this moment without anything else. Empty as the sky. There’s peace in this void. It’s settling. It feels like contentment. But I won’t reach for that either.
There are things in life that we just live past. I can walk down the sidewalk and never look at the ground. It’s just there. I’ve spent most of my life in the same area and never paid attention to the details of neighbors’ houses. At the store I’m looking at the items on the shelf. Not the shelf. Not what the shelf is attached to. Once I cross the threshold I don’t really take the building itself into consideration unless something about it is uncomfortable or different than it was.
I walk out of the store and across the parking lot. I give the employee pushing 30 carts plenty of room as I walk through the rows of parked cars. I settle into the driver’s seat looking over the dashboard and through the windshield.
The wind moves the overgrown ditch growth beside the parking lot. The white and yellow wildflowers move along with it. There it is. Something new. Something colorful against the green and gray. It’s different and depending on who you ask, technically a weed, but I welcome it.
The same sky from a different angle, not wildflowers but a thick layer of snow covers the ground. Feet and ankles swollen to the point that laces aren’t necessary on the borrowed shoes of the dead. A work crew builds a road as the supervisor watches. Gun in hand, swastika on his shoulder.
An entire system constructed to find the answer to the Jewish Question. Die Judenfrage. A puzzle that needed to be put together. A blank that needed to be filled in.
The occupants selected as good enough stock to be put to a useful purpose instead of used to fill large holes in the ground were fed. According to Viktor Frankl, they were fed 10.5 ounces of bread and 1.75 pints of thin soup per day. Often less.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl talks about the kindness of some capos, bosses who were also fellow prisoners. If they took a liking to you they would scoop to the bottom of the pot of watered-down soup and find you a couple of peas.
He tells of a commander who, despite being dulled by years of ever increasing doses of the brutal methods of the camps, took it upon himself to purchase medicine from a nearby village for his prisoners.
In the book he gives many examples of kindness despite the circumstances. He also shows instances of cruelty from fellow Jews, who in positions of power were all too eager to become fluent in the brutality against their own people. A method of survival through appealing to the system’s own methods.
It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
An act of kindness, the size of a pea, inside an institution of cruelty and indifference. In a landscape seemingly incapable of nourishment, such an act is certainly out of place.
A small gesture becomes a beautiful act of human decency. As if the pea was the gift of life itself. Amplified by its audacity to exist in the harshest environment.
Alive and removed. Looking back, Frankl discerns that,
From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
An explanation in a book, written and published soon after leaving the camp. A starved man who just found out that his wife, parents, and brother had died or been killed, reached for a labeling system. An explanation. These weren’t the musings and thoughts of a man with decades of hindsight. This was the view from a man who recently found himself on the opposite side of a barbed wire fence.
A scoop of broth with a couple peas inside of it is a move towards “the good.” A completion of God’s love as Augustine would certainly have seen it. Another thing he certainly would have agreed with is that a Nazi work camp was a deformed version of the same love. The Nazis believed they were solving a problem. Serving a higher purpose. “Good” and “Evil,” “Beautiful” and “Ugly,” “Order” and “Chaos,” are just different terminology for the same or similar scales.
Can both things exist as separate entities at the same time? Or do we zoom out and call them one thing?
What exactly are we measuring with the scale? Individual instance or overall situation?
How many things can we put on the scale at the same time?
Is a scale the right tool? Where do we put the scale?
In the pot of soup? In the snow? At a pharmacy in the next town? Inside a shoe so tight there’s no point in tying it?
The cardinal flew through the sky patrolling his territory. He then found a perch that happened to be a pile of construction debris. I developed an attachment to the bird and reached for a label. Beautiful. I’ve seen cardinals on several occasions and failed to label them anything.
The juxtaposition of the bird’s condition; Vibrant against the sky, unblemished from the life it happened to have lived against another set of objects and their own unique conditions; A pallet full of rubble that hadn’t been disposed of yet.
The only condition that both of these things share is that they exist. They don’t require anything further than that. They just are.
I gave it, or maybe them, a label. I arrived at the label intuitively and involuntarily. It arose from within me.
Plain truth. Rough edges.
This post is part of the On Evil series.
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