[threadbear]

I may have posted about this man in the past. His is the most astonishing, inspiring and insightful autobiography I have ever read. He ended up in a concentration camp during WW2, in his early twenties, due to his role in the French underground resistance movement. He managed to extract meaning and beauty from his experience in the camps. The really astonishing thing about him is he was blind from the age of 8. His experience with blindness, alone, was an epiphany for me. I have only had 2 epiphanies in my life and have read a great deal of "profound" literature. This is the very essence of life lived as an exquisite, beautifully articulated experience. You can't help but read his books, and compare them to the coarse, hideous modern self help books, featured on Oprah Winfrey without wanting to scream or cry.

His experience becoming blind:


It was a great surprise to me to find myself blind, and being blind was not at all as I imagined it.

Finally, one day, and it was not long in coming, I realized that I was looking in the wrong way. It was as simple as that. I was making something very like the mistake people make who change their glasses without adjusting themselves. I was looking too far off, and too much on the surface of things.

This was much more than a simple discovery, it was a revelation. I can still see myself in the Champ de Mars, where my father had taken me for a walk a few days after the accident. Of course I knew the garden well, its ponds, its railings, its iron chairs. I even knew some of the trees in person, and naturally I wanted to see them again. But I couldn't. I threw myself forward into the substance which was space, but which I did not recognize because it no longer held anything familiar to me.

At this point some instinct -- I was almost about to say a hand laid on me -- made me change course. I began to look more closely, not at things but at a world closer to myself, looking from an inner place to one further within, instead of clinging to the movement of sight toward the world outside.

"Immediately, the substance of the universe drew together, redefined and peopled itself anew. I was aware of a radiance emanating from a place I knew nothing about, a place which might as well have been outside me as within. But radiance was there, or, to put it more precisely, light. It was a fact, for light was there"

and...."Anger and impatience had the same effect, throwing everything into confusion. The minute before, I knew just where everything in the room was, but if I got angry, things got angrier than I. They went and hid in the most unlikely corners, mixed themselves up, turned turtle, muttered like crazy men and looked wild. As for me, I no longer knew where to put hand or foot. Everything hurt me. This mechanism worked so well that I became cautious.

When I was playing with my small companions, if I suddenly grew anxious to win, to be first at all costs, then all at once I could see nothing. Literally I went into fog or smoke.

I could no longer afford to be jealous or unfriendly, because, as soon as I was, a bandage came down over my eyes, and I was bound hand and foot and cast aside. All at once a black hole opened, and I was helpless inside it. But when I was happy and serene, approached people with confidence and thought well of them, I was rewarded with light. So is it surprising that I loved friendship and harmony when I was very young?".

http://www.ragged-edge-mag.com/0503/0503ldc.html


His experience in the camps:

The Living and the Dead:--------------

"When Jacques Lusseyran (see previous article) arrived at Buchenwald,
totally blind, he didn't know how to defend himself. "One day out of
two", he writes, "people were stealing my bread and my soup. I got so
weak that when I touched cold water my fingers burned as if they were on
fire."

And yet, jumping past the story he tells below, we find that Lusseyran
became the "official" newscaster for some thirty thousand prisoners in the
concentration camp. He made it his business to listen carefully to the
German newscasts that came over the loudspeaker system, inferring
everything he could from the gaps and circumlocutions in the reports. He
also received news from France, England and Russia via a clandestine radio
set up by some prisoners in one of the cellars. With this intelligence he
went around to the several blocks in the camp and announced the daily
progress of the Allied invasion of France and Germany.

It is hard to imagine what this service meant in Buchenwald. Lusseyran
found that rumors were rampant, impossible to trace. "Paris had fallen
once a day .... All were guilty, all were peddling rumors .... Doubt and
agony were taking root .... Everyone lied at Buchenwald, some from
discouragement, some from fear, others from ignorance, and some viciously.
I have watched men inventing the bombing of cities just for the pleasure
of torturing a neighbor who had all his dear ones in that place".

It would have been possible to write the news out, have it translated by
other prisoners into the several languages of the camp, and then
distributed. But this disembodied communication, Lusseyran says, would
not have served the need, which was for "realities that went straight to
the heart. Only a man standing before them could give them that. They
needed his calm and his voice, and it was I who had become the voice."

So he worked all day long at his task, digesting the news and going from
block to block to announce it -- in German and French himself, and in
other languages with the help of others. He first repeated the bulletins
of the German high command word for word, then explained what he
understood them to mean. He took the pulse of a block when he entered it.

I could sense the condition of a block by the noise it made as a body,
by its mixture of smells. You can't imagine how despair smells, or for
that matter confidence. They are worlds apart in their odor"

http://www.netfuture.org/1999/Jul2199_92.html#2

[mercurygirl]

Wow, that is amazing.

I read an article by chance just recently about him (in his words) in an old Parabola magazine and was fascinated and moved.

I think of him as so fortunate. So are you, TB, if you've had "only" two epiphanies. Life is a wonder, no doubt.

[threadbear]

Thanks so much Mercury Girl. A couple of years ago I knew nothing of Lussyran but was thinking a lot about the idea that light itself is more than an emanation of energy, but could somehow be conscious. I tossed this idea around for a while and then started experiencing coincidences associated with the idea.

Taking the coincidences as evidence that the idea may have some merit, I visited a local antiquarian book store, hoping to find a book by Rudolph Steiner or some other sophisticated thinker about the nature of light.

I was just about to leave the book store, frustrated in my quest, when I spotted this book, with big bold lettering on it's spine, (a turn off to me). I actually had to force myself to pick it up as I was sure it would be a kind of corny Christian, come to Jesus tract.

"And There Was Light" is anything but that and has made a huge impact on my life. There are other books that have come close, one being Victor Frankyl's-"Man's Search for Meaning"--similar in style and conclusions, written by a psychology major interred in Auschwitz. The other astonishing book, written in a WW2 setting and imprisonment setting is "The Invisible Writing" by Arthur Koestler. All full of social, spiritual and political commentary, but no "come to Jesus" stuff, much more universal.