Isolation

This is the journal created on 09/12/09.

For my summer reading assignment, I selected a book called Chess Story by Stefan Zweig. This is about the strength of isolation and its impact on human being and how it inevitably leads to alienation. As a brief summary, the book tells the story of an Austrian lawyer that had been imprisoned by the Gestapo during the Second World War for possessing important information concerning the Royal Family. The key point of the story is how Gestapo used the infinite power of isolation as a psychological torture. Dr. B., the Austrian lawyer, who was deprived of any intellectual support during his detention, slowly became alienated.

After finishing this book I stopped a minute and thought about this simple but extremely powerful torture. How privation of any intellectual support and distraction may inescapably conduct the healthiest person to alienation?

Finally, I came to the conclusion that intellectual support was as important for the mind as food for the body: lack of food may lead to the physical death and lack of intellectual activity to psychological death.