EXTRA CREDIT | Cut Off: Separation at the Scene of Suffering | by Emory Cooper

Professor, not long ago I took my mother and husband to Auschwitz. I was in a fever to show them everything. 'Look!...here was my barracks...There, over there was––and over here was––.' My husband says to me: 'Krishna, nothing is there; only grass. Whatever exists' only in your head now." And I thought, 'Why did I come? A museum for tourists...' Sometimes I feel so cut off.

The above is an excerpt from Another Sunrise, an aria performed in Tuesday night's lecture recital, An Alphabet of Soldiers. When I heard these lines, I reflected back to a passage near the end of Albert Camus' Plague that we discussed in class. "Many...looked like people out for a casual stroll...in reality most of them were making sentimental pilgrimages to places where they had gone to school with suffering. The newcomers were being shown the striking or obscurer tokens of the plague, relics of its passage" (Camus, Part Five, p. 297). In both the aria and the novel, one who has suffered shows one's loved ones the place where the suffering took place, in an attempt to make them empathetically more aware and appreciative of what one has been through. But why does one want empathy from loved ones? Because without this empathy, one cannot help but feel "cut off."

Consider this situation from the existentialist perspective. Krystyna Żywulska (Krishna) and the plague survivors have experienced trials of suffering so extreme that they feel separated from the rest of mankind. In other words, they have psychological isolation anxiety. According to existentialism, to find relief from the anxiety the sufferers must either embrace the isolation, or try to resolve it. The sufferers naturally then want to resolve the isolation, so they try getting others to participate in "the fellowship of [their] sufferings" (see Philippians 3:10), or empathize, by showing them where they suffered.