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After his prologue on Sylvia Plath, Alvarez begins part two with a weird, macabre anecdote of a suicide that is even odder than the one we opened with, about the school teacher who cut off his head in a sack so as not to make a bad mess. He quotes from the letter of a Russian emigre in London writing to his sister.
_ _ _
A man was hanged who had cut his throat, but who had been brought back to life. They hanged him for suicide. The doctor had warned them that it was impossible to hang him as the throat would burst open and he would breathe through the aperture. They did not listen to his advice and hanged their man. The wound in the neck immediately opened and the man came back to life again although he was hanged. It took time to convoke the aldermen to decide the question of what was to be done. At length the aldermen assembled and bound up the neck below the wound until he died. Oh my Mary, what a crazy society and what a stupid civilization.
-- Nicholas Ogarev, quoted in “The Savage God”
_ _ _
By this colorful example, Alvarez gives us the flavor of how suicide was treated in Christian Europe until modern times, such an execrable act it was deemed, perhaps worse than rape. He has some interesting observations, though, about the Christian grounding of this perspective, which we shall save for next time.
_ _ _
A man was hanged who had cut his throat, but who had been brought back to life. They hanged him for suicide. The doctor had warned them that it was impossible to hang him as the throat would burst open and he would breathe through the aperture. They did not listen to his advice and hanged their man. The wound in the neck immediately opened and the man came back to life again although he was hanged. It took time to convoke the aldermen to decide the question of what was to be done. At length the aldermen assembled and bound up the neck below the wound until he died. Oh my Mary, what a crazy society and what a stupid civilization.
-- Nicholas Ogarev, quoted in “The Savage God”
_ _ _
By this colorful example, Alvarez gives us the flavor of how suicide was treated in Christian Europe until modern times, such an execrable act it was deemed, perhaps worse than rape. He has some interesting observations, though, about the Christian grounding of this perspective, which we shall save for next time.
