Article and Photography
By: Curtis Beaird
Grim. It's always grim, or seems to be. To begin the day is to discover what went wrong while you slept.
Sometimes you just have to take a step back and check, ask and wonder, “Is the shade of gray always the color of every day?”
If anyone could weigh in with a defining "Yes", it should be Victor Frankle. Three years in various Nazi death camps to include Auschwitz. There, a person was a number, never a name. Frankle was not Dr. Frankle, he was Number 119,104. While he existed daily with the possibility of extermination, he spent the waiting time digging and laying track for a railway line. Grim.
Surely every day, that experience would strip life to naked existence, turn the context into a joyless void and squeeze even the memory of a fluid life from all thought and conversation . It would be expected that a person, even a Dr. Frankle would define today and tomorrow in the gray tones of grim.
But, not for Frankle. In the context of the absurd, he not only survived but discovered. While his body weakend and became frail, he never surrendered his identity nor falsified himself to himself. He defined what he called the last of human freedoms --- the ability to “choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances”.
Who knows, there might be a better way between the romantic and the grim, between the idealist and the failed idealist i.e. the cynic. There might be.
Depends, I guess, on the color of your day.
P.S. I looked. I looked right out my window. Sure nuff, nature managed a blue sky today. What is she up to anyway? How dare her present me with a bright day, a cool breeze, butterflies and the drilling sounds of a red-headed woodpecker. She's not going to get away with it. I'm turning away so I can watch the news. Grim.
Copyright 2011, Curtis Beaird. All rights reserved.
