dignity

…The guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind… 

Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand. Random House. 2010. 496 pages.

an unlikely intellectual refuge

Given how badly the men’s bodies were faring, it would seem likely that their minds, too, would begin to fail. But more than five weeks into their ordeal, both Louie and Phil were enjoying remarkable precision of mind, and were convinced that they were growing sharper every day. They continued quizzing each other, chasing each other’s stories down to the smallest detail, teaching each other melodies and lyrics, and cooking imaginary meals. 

Louie found that the raft offered an unlikely intellectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing moving but the slow procession of shark fins, every vista empty save water and sky, his time unvaried and unbroken, his mind was freed of an encumbrance that civilization had imposed on it. In his head, he could roam anywhere, and he found that his mind was quick and clear, his imagination unfettered and supple. He could stay with a thought for hours, turning it about.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand. Random House. 2010. 496 pages.

time to put on the pot

Tony, who had a sense of humor, soon devised a favorite way to start or end all conversation. He would turn suddenly to Gene (whom he called Henry, after his favorite radio character), and order with a mischievous grin:

“Come on Henry – time to put on the pot!”

“Henry” and I never failed to enter into the spirit of the game, with elaborate suggestions for the making and pouring of the coffee. We frequently adopted ludicrously exaggerated drawing-room tones and gestures for this ritual, broadly burlesquing what we fondly believed was the true Park Avenue manner.

Later, I think, it must have been this continual practice of deliberate idiocy that kept us from going really insane in our exposure, starvation, and thirst.


The Raft: The Courageous Struggle of Three Naval Airmen against the Sea by Robert Trumbull. 1942. United States Naval Institute. p. 38