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Mr. Alvarez continues to expound on the inherently personal and mysterious nature of suicide.
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Suicide often seems to the outsider a supremely motiveless perversity, performed, as Montesquieu complained, “most unaccountably … in the very bosom of happiness,” and for reasons which seem trivial or even imperceptible. Thus Pavese killed himself at the height of both his creative powers and his public success, using as his excuse an unhappy affair with a dim little American actress whom he had known only briefly. On hearing of his death, her only comment was, “I didn’t know he was so famous.”
There is even a case of an eighteenth-century gentleman who hanged himself out of sheer boredom and good taste, in order to save himself the trouble of putting on and pulling off his clothes.
In other words, a suicide’s excuses are mostly casual. At best they assuage the guilt of the survivors, soothe the tidy-minded and encourage the sociologists in their endless search for convincing categories and theories. [...] The real motives which impel a man to take his own life are elsewhere; they belong to the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly out of sight.
-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”
_ _ _
Suicide often seems to the outsider a supremely motiveless perversity, performed, as Montesquieu complained, “most unaccountably … in the very bosom of happiness,” and for reasons which seem trivial or even imperceptible. Thus Pavese killed himself at the height of both his creative powers and his public success, using as his excuse an unhappy affair with a dim little American actress whom he had known only briefly. On hearing of his death, her only comment was, “I didn’t know he was so famous.”
There is even a case of an eighteenth-century gentleman who hanged himself out of sheer boredom and good taste, in order to save himself the trouble of putting on and pulling off his clothes.
In other words, a suicide’s excuses are mostly casual. At best they assuage the guilt of the survivors, soothe the tidy-minded and encourage the sociologists in their endless search for convincing categories and theories. [...] The real motives which impel a man to take his own life are elsewhere; they belong to the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly out of sight.
-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”
