I believe we've talked about the way people tend to have "witnessing" experiences in times of crisis. For example, I've told of a co-worker who reported, upon being told she had cancer, that she felt as though she was watching the diagnosis being given to another person. But we haven't talked about a related phenomenon that I've noticed, which is that people sometimes survive difficult situations by maintaining something of a witness's perspective toward them. Or so it seems.
I'll say at the outset that I recognize that most survivors do nothing like what I'm about to describe. There are many ways to cope with adversity, and many degrees of strength going into adversity that would help a person cope with it. Yet this quality of witnessing seems to help, too. I was reminded of this experience by an article about H.G. Adler I read in a recent "New Yorker." Adler survived an astounding three-plus years in Nazi work camps. As I was wondering how he did it, I encountered this passage: "Adler himself writes, in his introduction to 'Theresienstadt 1941-1945,' that within a few months of his arrival in the cap it became clear tro him that he had a responsibility to analyze his situation systematically rather than passively surrender to it. 'I said to myself: You must observe life in this society as soberly and objectively as a scientist studying an obscure tribe.... Thus I lived in the camp simultaneously as both an outside observer and a typical prisoner.'" Adler's objectivity reminded me of two other people encountered in my readings: Frank Hurley, the photographer on Ernest Shackleton's 1914 expedition to the South Pole that resulted in the expedition being stranded there; and John Ransom, author of "Andersonville Diary," an account of his imprisonment in the American Civil War's notoriously deadly military prison. I cannot say that Hurley and Ransom were survivors by virtue of the objectivity each gained in his art. Ranson was a photographer who continued to shoot pictures as their ship, the Endurance, was crushed by ice and the crew was stranded; Ransom, maintained a log of his experiences while imprisoned. But I have to wonder if the task they took on - that of documenting their ordeals - didn't help them to survive. All of Shackleton's crew got out alive, but Hurley was a particularly active member of the party. Ransom very nearly died, but another trait of his, his extreme affability, seemed to have come to his rescue when a camp-mate carried the ailing Ransom out of the camp when only the healthy were to be allowed out. I do not know what role the diary played in helping him prevail, but something makes me think it helped, just as it helped Hurley to capture strikingly beautiful images of a situation that threatened to kill him. This post is more rambling and incoherent than I'd like, but I wanted to lump these three men together - Adler, Hurley and Ransom - with this idea that, in a crisis, some distance from one's travails may help one survive.
