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“The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.”
-- Michael Bakunin
After my last post on Sylvia Plath, Alvarez’s “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide” has been teasing my mind. It is probably not a coincidence that Beschloss’s “The Conquerors” about Word War Two has started dragging for me. I have stopped fighting it and am switching.
It was the suicide of Sylvia Plath that motivated Alvarez to write this book, and being a literary man himself, his take on the subject is cast more in a literary spirit, rather than, say, a chart-filled sociological study. So, this is going to be a lot more fun.
Well, it will be fun for me. I am a little concerned for others, because too many of us think too much about suicide as it is, and I don’t like the idea of encouraging these dark musings. In the end, though, you have to go with what interests you, right? Maybe there’s a reason for it.
_ _ _
When I was at school there was an unusually sweet-tempered, rather disorganized physics master who was continually talking, in a jocular way, about suicide. He was a small man with a large red face, a large head covered with woolly gray curls and a permanent worried smile. He was said to have got a first in his subject at Cambridge, unlike most of his colleagues. One day at the end of a lesson, he remarked mildly that anyone cutting his throat should always be careful to put his head in a sack first, otherwise he would leave a terrible mess. Everyone laughed. The the one o’clock bell rang and the boys all trooped off to lunch. The physics master cycled straight home, put his head in a sack and cut his throat. There wasn’t much mess. I was tremendously impressed.
-- A. Alvarez, thus opening his preface to “The Savage God”
-- Michael Bakunin
After my last post on Sylvia Plath, Alvarez’s “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide” has been teasing my mind. It is probably not a coincidence that Beschloss’s “The Conquerors” about Word War Two has started dragging for me. I have stopped fighting it and am switching.
It was the suicide of Sylvia Plath that motivated Alvarez to write this book, and being a literary man himself, his take on the subject is cast more in a literary spirit, rather than, say, a chart-filled sociological study. So, this is going to be a lot more fun.
Well, it will be fun for me. I am a little concerned for others, because too many of us think too much about suicide as it is, and I don’t like the idea of encouraging these dark musings. In the end, though, you have to go with what interests you, right? Maybe there’s a reason for it.
_ _ _
When I was at school there was an unusually sweet-tempered, rather disorganized physics master who was continually talking, in a jocular way, about suicide. He was a small man with a large red face, a large head covered with woolly gray curls and a permanent worried smile. He was said to have got a first in his subject at Cambridge, unlike most of his colleagues. One day at the end of a lesson, he remarked mildly that anyone cutting his throat should always be careful to put his head in a sack first, otherwise he would leave a terrible mess. Everyone laughed. The the one o’clock bell rang and the boys all trooped off to lunch. The physics master cycled straight home, put his head in a sack and cut his throat. There wasn’t much mess. I was tremendously impressed.
-- A. Alvarez, thus opening his preface to “The Savage God”
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Suicide Etiquette
Date: 2011-08-20 09:57 am (UTC)From:http://youtu.be/_l42Or3q9TE
You may like the show!
Re: Suicide Etiquette
Date: 2011-08-20 01:08 pm (UTC)From: