October 30, 2026

Curiosity Even Now

Apart from that strange kind of humor, another sensation seized us: curiosity. I had seen it before in other men, as a fundamental reaction towards certain strange circumstances. When my life was once endangered by a mountain-climbing accident, my only sensation at the time was curiosity, curiosity as to whether I should come out of it alive or with a fractured skull.

Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who spent nearly three years in Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, before writing this book in 1946 in the span of nine days. In this passage he describes a strange discovery he made about the human mind even amid starvation and daily threat of death: curiosity kept surfacing, almost involuntarily, as a way of watching his own fate unfold. He links it to an earlier memory from civilian life, a near-fatal mountain climbing accident, where his dominant feeling was not terror but curiosity about the outcome. It is a striking claim that wonder is not a luxury reserved for safe, comfortable lives but a faculty that can show up anywhere, even in horror, if we let it.