The Wall - Marlen Haushofer

Summary:

After a mysterious invisible wall suddenly isolates her from the rest of the world, an unnamed woman finds herself trapped in the Austrian Alps with only a dog, a cow, and later other animals for company. Believing everyone beyond the wall has died, she gradually learns to survive by farming, hunting, and caring for her animals. Years pass in complete isolation until one day she encounters another man, who kills her bull and her beloved Lynx before she shoots him. Left alone once again, she continues living, and the novel ends with a white crow appearing outside, waiting for her.

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

I read this book as if “the dignity of a butler” was a metaphor for what it means to be a good person.

Stevens spends the beginning of the book trying to define dignity. He talks to other butlers, looks at his father, wonders whether dignity comes naturally or can be learned. To me, this felt like asking what a good person looks like. We take advice from wise people, we look at role models, and we wonder whether we can become better people even if we were not born into the “elite club.”

One of the ideas that stayed with me was his question of whether dignity can really exist unless it is tested. Without hardship, can we really say someone has dignity? It reminded me of Man’s Search for Meaning, where Frankl says that unless someone can honestly say they would not behave the same way under the same circumstances, they should be careful judging others. The same question applies here: Can someone really say they are good if their goodness has never been tested?

Another thing I kept thinking about was Stevens’s relationship with emotions.

There were two moments where he showed emotion to the outside world but refused to acknowledge it inside himself. One was when his father died. The other was when Miss Kenton told him she was leaving to get married. Other people could see something was happening to him, but internally he refused to participate in it.

I found it difficult to understand. I’m Turkish, so emotions are everything for us. They are part of who you are. I couldn’t wrap my head around being afraid of them.

The relationship between Stevens and Miss Kenton was fascinating. I don’t know whether he consciously loved her, whether the trip was an unconscious attempt to love, or whether the romance novel scene was Ishiguro winking at the reader about Stevens’s emotional state. I don’t think those questions have definitive answers.

What I do think is that, at the end, when Miss Kenton says she sometimes wondered what life with Stevens might have been like, it felt less like a declaration of love and more like a parting gift. She knew nothing could happen anymore. But she cared enough about him to make him see that there is more to life than being a butler.

The old man on the bench also stayed with me:

“You’ll be sorry if you don’t take a walk up there. A couple more years and it might be too late.”

From the moment I read it, it didn’t feel like advice about walking up a hill. It felt like advice about life. Don’t postpone living because one day the opportunity simply won’t be there anymore.

Another small moment I loved was when Stevens didn’t run over the chicken. It was one of the very few moments that genuinely put him in good spirits, and it happened completely outside his world as a butler. Just a simple act of kindness, appreciated by another person.

The ending disappointed me.

Even though Stevens briefly admits that evening is the best part of the day, he still finishes the novel trying to stretch the day by becoming better at banter. I wanted him to become more in touch with himself, but he still identified himself primarily as a butler.

One distinction the ending made me think about is that there are two different kinds of dignity in the novel.

The first is the dignity of being a butler.

The second is the dignity of life itself.

When Stevens reflects that perhaps there is dignity in making your own mistakes, he is no longer talking about butlers. He is talking about living. The tragedy is that he seems to realize, very late, that being an excellent butler and living a dignified human life are not necessarily the same thing.

Man’s Search for Meaning - Viktor E. Frankl

I just finished Man’s Search for Meaning, and I have very mixed feelings about it.

The first thing that struck me was this sentence:

“We are indebted to the Second World War for enriching our knowledge…”

What the fuck? This much detachment from the experience of going through a concentration camp and losing basically everyone you love is almost pathological. It feels to me as if he detached himself from the emotions and took life as a “responsibility” which is quite different from how I interpret suffering and life. 

Moreover, his definition of meaning is very vague and not very instructive or helpful in finding your own. The entire book revolves around the idea that if you don’t have meaning, you might as well not continue. He said this explicitly in his examples of people not having anything to look forward or meaning in the camps giving up. This kind of approach can make many people desperate. It makes you feel incomplete for not having a meaning.

And then I kept asking myself: What exactly is meaning? He gave some categories for different meanings someone can have but in no way there were methods. He also continued with repeating in multiple places what Nietzche said: "Those who have a why to live can bear almost any how."

Why does meaning have to be so strong and grand that I can do anything for it basically? If I don’t know what my meaning is, does that mean I’m already failing? Or I can't bear things. And what does it say about people who couldn't bear any how, does that mean they didn't have meaning or their version of meaning was not strong enough?

Frankl also says meaning changes from moment to moment. But that almost makes it harder to find your meaning. You can't look at it in such a narrow timeframe as “What matters today?”. It wouldn’t help anyone survive a concentration camp. I don’t think his definition of meaning is this minimal.

Then I started wondering if maybe we’re looking at it the wrong way. Steve Jobs said we can only connect the dots looking back. What if I can only find meaning after I live through it and not at the beginning? I don’t know if I suffered and studied and worked and moved for the sake of helping my parents. It was a very happy byproduct which, looking back now, gave meaning to all my suffering. Maybe meaning isn’t something you discover. Maybe it’s something you recognize afterwards.

Against all my reservations, there is something I truly admire about Frankl though. Going through all that, and while describing suffering, he says suffering is relative. He wasn’t diminishing anyone’s suffering despite possibly living through one of the worst experiences a human being can survive. That is quite admirable to me.

I also found myself underlining many of his observations almost immediately.

Not judging people too quickly.

Fear creating the very thing we fear.

Unnecessary suffering being masochistic rather than heroic.

And the danger of becoming an oppressor after being oppressed.

Those ideas felt timeless.

Even though I don’t think that I agree with Frankl with his philosophy of meaning, I appreciate the book.