Monk

Sometimes you just have to savor the little joys in life.

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Without the buttress of Christianity, without the cold dignity of a Stoicism that had evolved in response to a world in which human life was a trivial commodity, cheap enough to be expended at every circus to amuse the crowd, the rational obstacles [against suicide] begin to seem strangely flimsy. When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself. You pause and attend: the heart beats in your chest; outside, the trees are thick with new leaves, a swallow dips over them, the light moves, people are going about their business. Perhaps this is what Freud meant by “the narcissistic satisfactions [which the ego] derives from being alive.” Most of the time, they seem enough. They are, anyway, all we ever have or can ever expect.

-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”

Supporting the proposition that one may as well take in as much life as one can on the grounds that death and nothingness will come soon enough, Mr. Alvarez reaches movingly into the experience of the Russian concentration camps in finding the affirmation for life.

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“Life is a gift that nobody should renounce,” the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam said to his wife when, in exile after his imprisonment, she proposed that they commit suicide together if Stalin’s secret police took them again.

Mandelstam was, in fact, rearrested and died in a forced-labor camp somewhere in Siberia. Yet right up to the end he refused his wife’s alternatives: “Whenever I talked of suicide, M. used to say: ‘Why hurry? The end is the same everywhere, and here they hasten it for you.’ Death was so much more real, and so much simpler than life, that we all involuntarily tried to prolong our earthly existence, even if only for a brief moment - just in case the next day brought some relief! In war, in the camps and during periods of terror, people think much less about death (let alone about suicide) than when they are living normal lives. Whenever at some point on earth, mortal terror and the pressure of utterly insoluble problems are present in a particularly intense form, general questions about the nature of being recede into the background. How could we stand in awe before the forces of nature and the eternal laws of existence if terror of a mundane kind was felt so tangibly in everyday life? In a strange way, despite the horror of it, this also gave a certain richness to our lives. Who knows what happiness is? Perhaps it is better to talk in more concrete terms of the fullness or intensity of existence, and in this sense there may have been something more deeply satisfying in our desperate clinging to life than in what people generally strive for.”

-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”

But how can suicide not be rational, especially if you do not believe in a larger divine realm in which your suicide may be penalized (and you are not among the pretty and the wealthy)?

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If secularized man were kept going only by the pleasure principle, the human race would already be extinct. Yet maybe his secular quality is his strength. He chooses life because he has no alternative, because he knows that after death there is nothing at all. When Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus - in 1940, after the fall of France, a serious personal illness and depressive crisis - he began with suicide and ended with an affirmation of individual life, in itself and for itself, desirable because it is “absurd,” without final meaning or metaphysical justification.

-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”

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We will be swallowed up into the void and nothingness soon enough, so why not take in the sights and sounds while you can do so and dream a little dream? This line of thinking can work for some of us, for a while, but it is hardly the knock-down argument proving suicide is objectively wrong or irrational. This merely helps to more fully color the situation and inform the question: is life worth living?

Mr. Alvarez begins the third chapter, titled “Feelings”, with his conclusions from the last chapter on the inscrutable underpinnings of the act of suicide. Although he pleasantly allows for the possibility that the Roman stoics may have had the culture that made such cold calculation possible, Alvarez clearly dismisses the idea of the rational suicide.

Personally, I disagree with this position. I regard it as part of the dark mystery of suicide that a person can coolly consider his life circumstances and his prospects and conclude that suicide is his best option and then act upon it. I am not saying that most suicides are of this nature, nor even very many of them, but I doubt that it is so incredibly rare a phenomenon among the suicides as Mr. Alvarez would have us believe.

In any case, in this excerpt, Alvarez gives us the example of John Robeck for the idea that rational suicides are truly bizarre.

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In 1735 John Robeck, a Swedish philosopher living in Germany, completed a long stoic defense of suicide as a just, right and desirable act; he then carefully put his principles into practice by giving away his property and drowning himself in the Weser. His death was the sensation of the day. It provoked Voltaire to comment through one of the characters in Candide: “... I have seen a prodigious number of people who hold their existence in execration, but I have only seen a dozen who voluntarily put an end to their misery: three Negroes, four Englishmen, four Genevois, and a German professor called Robeck.” Even for Voltaire, the supreme rationalist, a purely rational suicide was something prodigious and slightly grotesque, like a comet or a two-headed sheep.

-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”

“Listen to the newborn infant’s cry in the hour of birth - see the death struggles in the final hour - and then declare whether what begins and ends in this way can be intended to be enjoyment.”

-- Soren Kierkegaard

“No one kills himself who has never wanted to kill another, or at least wished the death of another.”

-- Wilhelm Stekel

Thus Mr. Alvarez lays out the root of the famous proposition that suicide is violent anger directed inward. And perhaps this inversion is most successful when we realize that our anger is not really about any particular others, as one begins to see that it is oneself that is out of place, that does not belong, that is too weak, too ugly, too tired. How do you kill a country or a culture, the world?

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”

Still pursuing the theme that suicide is not merely a function of social malady, Mr. Alvarez notes how there can even be an inverse correlation between social welfare and the suicide rate. We also get to see George Orwell in this excerpt.

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It goes without saying that external misery has relatively little to do with suicide. The figures are higher in the wealthy industrialized countries than in the underdeveloped, higher among the comfortable professional middle classes than among the poor; they were extraordinarily low in the Nazi concentration camps. Indeed deprivation can be a stimulus. Witness the classic case of George Orwell, who, after he left the Burma police, deliberately turned his back on all help and opportunities, and by choosing to be “down and out in Paris and London,” turned himself into a serious artist.

-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”

“An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art.”

-- Camus

In this extraction from Al Alvarez’s “Savage God”, we are still dealing with the idea that even the best of social theories that seek to explain and resolve suicides cannot really get at the heart of the problem, that it is too central a part of the human condition, the pain that life means for us. As he writes:

Perhaps this is why the more convincing the social theories, the more independent they seem of the material on which they are based. They are superstructures, often elegant and lovingly detailed, but built on simple misery, a terminal inner loneliness which no amount of social engineering will alleviate.

Of course, the problem is worse for some than for others, but everyone presumably has their moments of feeling crushed and abandoned, of feeling that life is a tough game they just were not built to play.

“At some stage of evolution man must have discovered that he can kill not only animals and fellow-men but also himself. It can be assumed that life has never since been the same to him.”

-- Professor Stengel

Yes, and we have been a very emo sort of primate ever since.

And, no, I don’t know who Professor Stengel is, either. This quote was extracted from Mr. Alvarez’s “The Savage God”. Alvarez is arguing against the idea that suicide is a problem of conditions, such as being too isolated from society for instance, but that it is an inextricable part of human nature - not a problem that can be solved. We, each and every one of us, feel the weight and burden of our existential struggle, and sometimes a person decides that he or she no longer wants to bear that struggle. Once we get past the innocence of childhood, that question is always before us: is life worth living? This question itself becomes part of our existential struggle.