I recently read a book which I will not long forget:  The Inhuman Land, by Jozef Czapski.  Published in 1949 but only recently translated into English from its native Polish and Russian, Inhuman Land chronicles Czapski's efforts, under order of Josef Stalin, to reconstitute the Polish army to aid the Soviets in their battle to turn back the German invasion of 1941.  Although under the Soviet-Nazi pact Stalin and Hitler agreed to parcel up Poland and refrain from attacking one another, Hitler, as most readers know, soon violated the agreement.  He sent his army into Russia in June of 1941.
     History now knows that this was very likely Hitler's biggest strategic mistake, one that, in the big picture, was the first step in his eventual demise.  At the time, however, the sight of Nazi tanks rolling across western Russia was truly frightening.  Stalin quickly realized that he needed all the help he could get.
     As Czapski sought to meet his mandate, however, he encountered a host of bureaucratic setbacks and cultural obstacles:  he found doing what he had been assigned to do extraordinarily difficult.  But he persevered.  Along the way, and this is the heart of his work, he was given an unique eyewitness view of a nation at once gathering and falling apart, a people whose cultural foundations were being slowly eviscerated, a once proud country now tumbling into a land of twisted and unimaginable horror.  Starvation, massacre, political subterfuge, and military ineptitude fused together in a slow and steady grinding down of any semblance of humanness.
     On the other hand, Czapski witnessed immense acts of altruism, generosity, and wisdom.  Repeatedly, he saw people who were standing on the brink of total life destruction sacrifice themselves for another, letting go of what little they had to help another get through one more day.
     And for what?  In the space of a fortnight, they would be gone, too.  Why?  Why do we cling so desperately to something so achingly ephemeral?
     Perhaps we sense, consciously or not, that life is bigger than itself, that there is more to what we visibly see.