Night: Dialectic Journal, One

"We were incapable of thinking anything at all. Our senses were blunted; Everything was blurred as in a fog. It was no longer possible to grasp anything. The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had deserted us."

Elie Wiesel uses this description of his experience after arriving at Auschwitz to represent the state of all the people there, who -by reading this quote- seem to have lost the essence of their humanity. In earlier an earlier post I said, "a human's state of nature is to be selfish and greedy. In other words, to look out for one's best interest." These very feelings are absent or suppressed and have made Wiesel and his peers "half-dead". Or perhaps we can say him and his humanity have simply been separated, and are waiting for the right conditions for them to come together again. I don't think that this would at all be a pleasant state for a person to be living. We return to the idea of animal instincts, but I think here we go even farther because even animals have pride and an inclination for self-defense. The fact that death is constantly hovering over the people at Auschwitz perhaps could push them to the point where all they truly want is to die, in order to escape those conditions and the strain and focus of death on the mind and body.