SCHOLAR ISLAND

"Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune or "broken heart" is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death. It is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (suicide note)

"There is only one serious philosophical problem-the problem of suicide."

Albert Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus

"I begin to think that the only real sin is suicide or not being oneself."

-Sir John Woodroffe

   "We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead. In short, the essence of that contradiction lies in what I shall call the act of eluding because it is both less and more than diversion in the Pascalian sense. Eluding is the invariable game. The typical act of eluding....is hope. Hope of another life one must 'deserve' or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it.

   Does (life's) absurdity require one to escape it through hope or suicide-this what must be clarified, hunted down, and elucidated."

-Camus

"The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps."

-Havelock Ellis (1859-1939)

"I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide."

-William James

"The power of dying when one pleases is the best thing that God has given to man admidst all the suffering of life."

Pliny

"It is the part of cowardliness, and not of virtue, to seek to squat itself in some hollow lurking hole, or to hide herself under some massive tomb, thereby to shun the strokes of fortune."

-Michel De Montaigne (1533-92)

"Nine men in ten are suicides."

-Ben Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanac)

"No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide."

Cesare Pavese

"There may be reason in saying that a man should want, and not take his own life until God summons him."

Socrates

"The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort: with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad night."

-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

""Then it is sin

To rush into the secret house of death

Ere death dare come to us?"

-William Shakespeare 

Antony and Cleopatra

"Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life."

Vaclav Havel

"Why are the Swiss so happy?" I ask Jalil.

"Because we know we can always kill ourselves," he says with a laugh, but he's not joking. Switzerland has one of the world's most liberal euthanasia laws. People travel from all over Europe to die here.

   The strangeness of it all sinks in. In Switzerland it's illegal to flush your toilet past 10:00 p.m. or mow your lawn on Sunday, but it's perfectly legal to kill yourself.

-Eric Weiner

The Geography of Bliss

"If you must commit suicide....always contrive to do it  as decorously as possible; the decencies, whether of life or of death, should never be lost sight of" ."

George Borrow (1803-81)

Starvation is a gentle way to go by Geoffrey Cannon

Adapted extract from 'The Good Fight, The Life and Work of Caroline Walker' bestselling food campaigner and co-author of 'The Food Scandal', by Geoffrey Cannon

   Just as there are societies to encourage home births, so there should be societies for home deaths. Being looked after at home is more trouble, of course, just as home cooking takes more time. But dying in hospital, as most people now do, stuck full of tubes in white rooms, surrounded by suffering and strangers, with those you love kept at the end of a telephone, is a sad and bad ending. Caroline thought being sent to hospital to die is like being put in a skip (no disrespect to builders or doctors).

   At home in August, Caroline finished planting our garden, with seeds and bulbs identified with little flags, so I would know what to expect next spring and summer. She gave two interviews; one at the beginning of the month, for the Guardian on her sense of death, as we ate lunch; the other from her bed, at the end of the month, for BBC Radio 4's Food Programme on the meaning of her work.

   Our home filled with family and friends and flowers. Pain was the only uncertainty. The surgeons had warned me that obstruction caused by the cancer would eventually be horribly painful. Not so; Dr. Anne Naysmith, consultant at our local community hospital, a woman about Caroline's age, disagreed; and with a careful cocktail of drugs, Caroline rested at home, and took responsibility for her death, simply by stopping eating, two weeks before she died. Around midnight as her last began, she foresaw her death. How was it-what did the thought feel like? 'Oh, lovely,' she said; and we laughed. And it was lovely to be with her when she died..

   So, here after all is more advice. Starvation is a gentle way to let go. Find a general practitioner who will be your friend. And share.

   'I want to share with you why I shall always be grateful Caroline,' wrote a friend. 'She could always make me laugh with her wonderful sense of the absurd and her sharp wit. But it was the last few months of her life that were a real inspiration to me. She showed me that the time of dying can be an enriching and growing experience."

The Book of Visions

"We cannot tear out a single page from our life, but we can throw the whole book into the fire."

-George Sand

"To practically everyone at some time in his life comes the thought of suicide in greater or lesser degrees."

Dr. Thomas W. Salimon

"If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will."

-Antonin Artaud

"Each of us kills himself in his own fashion. Slowly or quickly-he does it. The reasons are many, and some are beyond explanation. Nevertheless, if you understand the implications of this truth, you will enhance your chances of delaying or obstructing your own destructive processes."

Peter J. Stein Crohm M.D.

How to stop killing Yourself

"Although homicides tend to garner the headlines, a different and perhaps more disturbing form of violent death is on the rise around the world: suicide. Since the mid-1950s, global suicide rates have jumped by 60%. This year, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates 1 million people will die by their own hand.

Analysts are generally loathe to attribute rising suicides to any single cause. However, researchers have uncovered a seemingly counterintuitive trend: As a nations’ living standards increase, its suicide rate tends to rise as well. A 1984 study of 43 countries worldwide found that rising quality of life-measured by such factors as education, health, women’s status, and economic and political stability-is associated with declining homicide rates, but increasing suicide rates.

Social scientists hypothesize that people who experience deteriorating living standards may attribute their suffering to external factors and thus are more prone to take out their frustrations on others. This view is consistent with studies linking increases in income inequality with higher homicide rates. But when individuals experience steady improvement in the quality of their lives, they may blame continued unhappiness-whatever its true causes-on themselves.

Living in a more Violent World….Foreign Policy

"My work is done. Why wait?"

George Eastman….suicide note….

 

"My life came to a standstill....There was no life in me because I had no desires whose gratification I would have deemed it reasonable to fulfill. If I wanted something I knew in advance that whether or not I satisfied my desire nothing would come of it.

....All this was happening to me at a time when I was surrounded on all sides by what is considered complete happiness: I was not yet fifty, I had a kind, loving and beloved wife, lovely children, and a large estate that was growing and expanding with no effort on my part. I was respected by relatives and friends far more than ever before. I was praised by strangers and could consider myself a celebrity without deceiving myself. Moreover I was not unhealthy in mind or body.

  ....And in these circumstances I found myself at the point where I could no longer go on living and since I feared death, I had to deceive myself in order to refrain from suicide.

.....I could attribute any rational meaning to a single act, let alone to my whole life. I simply felt astonished that I had failed to realize this from the beginning. It had all been common knowledge for such a long time. Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come (and they had already arrived) to those dear to me, and to myself, and nothing will remain other than the stench and the worms. Sooner or later my deeds, whatever they may have been, will be forgotten and will no longer exist. What is all the fuss about then?

.....It is only possible to go on living while your intoxicated with life; once sober it is impossible not see what it is all a mere trick, and a stupid trick!"

Leo Tolsoy, Confession

 

"....Here (in this lifetime) is no real and lasting satisfaction;....our pleasures are only vanity;.....our evils are infinite; and , lastly death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years under the dreadful necessity of being forever annihilated or unhappy.

   There is nothing more real than this, nothing more terrible....Let us reflect on this, and then say whether it is not beyond doubt that there is no good in this life but in the hope of another.....and that, as there are no more woes for those who have complete assurance of eternity, so there is no more happiness for those who no insight into it."

-Pascal

 

"The theme of these pages is born of a double astonishment: that the notion of a Christ who would commit suicide should have been born so early, as early in fact as the Gospel of John; and that this notion should owe virtually nothing to the anti-Christian polemic of the first centuries. The idea of the suicide of Christ will have been, before all else, a Christian if not indeed a Christological idea."

Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat

Le Suicide du Christ

 

"In 1610, Donne wrote Pseudo-Martyr, a dismissal of the dissident Catholic martyrs of the early seventeenth century as deluded suicides. Then, just a year later, he wrote Biathanatos, a defense of outright suicide in which Jesus himself is chief among the exemplary suicides of the past. Biathanatos-so daring in its day that it could be published only after Donne's death-is a tour de force of authentic intellectual passion. A fiercely brilliant scholar who once confessed a "sickely inclination" to become a biathanatos,(that is, a suicide: the Greek word means "one dead by violence, especially self-inflicted"), Donne was paradoxically strengthened by his pathology to trace Christian martyrdom to its source in the suicide of God Incarnate. Pseudo-Martyr, by contrast, seems a politically expedient work of conventional religious propaganda. yet who is to say that Donne did not believe what he wrote both times?"

Jack Miles

Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God

 

"So why do almost all cultures condemn suicide as a general and/or religious principle? People better qualified than me have tried to answer that. From a cursory glance at various cultures it is obvious that suicide is a threat to society, as well as an indication of both personal and societal weaknesses. "My God, people don't do such things," Hedda Gabler's husband Tesman says on discovering his wife's body. In a sense we are all Tesmans, making our world sane by making it familiar and orderly, and ignoring those aspects of it that disrupt that order. Suicide disrupts our world far more than simple death, because death is inevitable and suicide is not. It is a clear indication that something is wrong with an individual, and therefore possibly with us all. Recall that hole in the fabric of society that needs to be repaired after any death, to prove that life goes on. It is doubly hard to fill after a suicide. The very nature of the death implies the fabric may be rotten and not worth repairing."

Greg Palmer

Death: The Trip Of A Lifetime

 

   "In the tenement district where the Fullers now lived their next door neighbor was an Al Capone trigger man. When Mrs. Fuller carried trash to the incinerator, he gallantly assisted with the load, guns ever bristling from his armpit holsters. The environment symbolized Fuller's mood. This was a lower depths period; the surroundings were in harmony with desperation. Fuller weighed the thought of sending his wife and child back to New York to stay with his or her family. If he did this, he could quietly do away with himself. he felt himself close to suicide. He concluded, finally, that there was only one reason not to. "Bucky," he said to himself, "you've had many more industrial, scientific and social experiences than most of your steadier contemporaries. And if these experiences are put in order, they might be of use to others. Through them you might be able to discern and design environment controlling mechanics and structures that would provide spontaneously traveled bridges for mankind, which completely span the canyons of pain into which your have gropingly fallen. Whether you care to be or not, you are the custodian of a vital source."

R. Buckminster Fuller

 

"I recovered my immense will to live

when I realized that the meaning of my life

was the one I had chosen for it."

-Paulo Coelho

 

   "Suicide unfortunately is an act of supreme egotism whether it be viewed psychologically-the most "brutal way of making sure that you will not readily be forgotten"-or theologically-the usurpation of divine authority. Consequently the quickest way to defrock martyrs and deprive them of their laurels has been to accuse them of "tragic show," as the emperor Marcus Aurelius did of the early Christians, or of "Suicide while of Unsound Mid," as did the fourth knight of Thomas Becket in Eliot's Murder In the Cathedral. The only really effective rebuttal to such an attack is the one directed at Thomas Thackham in 1557 which accused him of bias and self-interest. Thackham had dismissed Julius Palmer's death at the stake as self-murder, and Palmer's defender wrote, "(I) sayeth that he died a martyr unto the Lord; you say in effect that he ended his life as a castaway and willful destroyer of himself. To be short, the story justifieth the martyrdom, You, to justify yourself, deface the martyr."

Lacey Baldwin Smith

Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom In the Western World

 

"The idea that killing oneself is both a sin and a crime is a relatively late Christian development, taking its impetus from Augustine's polemics against the self-destructive mania" of the Donatists in the late fourth and early fifth centuries and acquiring the status of canon law in a series of church councils during the sixth century. Throughout antiquity, the act of taking one's life had been respected admired, and even on occasion sought after as a means of attaining immortality. Now it became the focus of intense Christian opposition. It is a profound irony of Western history that later Christians theologians condemned the act of voluntary death as a sin for which Christ's similar act could not atone...

   That suicide should be a taboo subject (tells) us something about the thoughts we must fear. Both the psychological and sociological explanations of suicide can be seen as a form of "medicalization," for both operate on the pathological distinction between the normal and abnormal. Both attempt to explain the cause of disease not as an individual choice but (as a drive-) something over which the individual has little control. In medical discourse it is psychic derangement that compels an individual to suicide, in sociological discourse, it is....social (dislocation). Both wrest control of the act of suicide away from the individual, denying the suicide agency. From (this) perspective, suicide is....a "symptom" of both individual psychopathology and social disorganization (rather than) a religious and moral problem."

-Arthur Droge and James Tabor A Noble Death

 

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids Stain you;

And drugs cause cramp;

Guns aren't lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

-Dorothy Parker

 

"When you're lost in the wild, and you're scared

    as a child,

And death looks you bang in the eye,

And you're sore as a boil, it's according to Hoyle

To cock your revolver and.....die.

But the code of a man says: "Fight all you can,"

And self-dissolution is barred.

In hunger and woe, oh, it's easy to blow....

It's the hell-served-for breakfast that's hard.

 

You're sick of the game! "Well, now, that's a shame."

You're young and you're brave and you're bright

:you've had a raw deal!" I know-but don't squeal.

Buck up, do your damnedest, and fight.

It's the plugging away that will win you the day.

So don't be a piker, old Pard!

Just draw on your grit; it's so easy to quit:

it's the keeping-your-chin-up that's hard.

 

It's easy to cry that you're beaten-and die.

It's easy to crawfish and crawl;

But to fight and to fight when hope's out of sight,

Why, that's the best game of the all!

And thou you come out of each grueling bout

All broken and beaten and scarred,

Just have one more try-It's dead easy to die.

It's the keeping-on-living that's hard."

-Robert W. Service

 

   "Sooner or later, we all have to die, and it is only a slight exaggeration to say that in America death is either a crime or a medical accident. of course, death is never one to ask permission of the courts or the doctors, but those who do death's bidding can easily find themselves charged with a crime or sued. Suicide is illegal, and the suicidal are considered insane and medicated until they become easy to control, no matter how watertight their reasons for wanting to end it all quickly. helping someone commit suicide is also illegal. Dying in your own bed is almost impossible unless you do it in secret: anyone who finds out that you are dying and doesn't call an ambulance may end up in a lot of trouble. If you refuse or interfere with your own treatment, you are likely to be deemed incompetent and restrained, sedated, and forcibly treated.

   What is not illegal is keeping people alive against their will and fashioning them into wired, intubated, ghastly science experiments. Doctors pride themselves on such incongruous achievements, and those who manage to extend their life beyond all odds are considered heroic. many of the higher animals, humans among them, possess an instinct that tells them when they are near death. Following this instinct, they stop feeding, seek seclusion, become very still and await the inevitable end with dignified resignation. This innate behavior is denied to Americans, be they human or animal: they are not qualified to decide when it is time for them to die. This is a deep cultural flaw that affords the pathological fear of death the status of a heroic struggle."

-Dmitry Orlov

Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects

 

    *************************************

Book: "A Full Inquiry Into the Subject of Suicide: To which are added two treatises on dueling and Gaming" by Charles Moore

Book: "History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture" by Georges Minois

Book: "The Enigma of Suicide" by George Howe Colt

Book: "Kamikaze: Japan's Suicide Samurai" by Raymond Lamont-Brown

Book: "Final Drafts: Suicides of World-Famous Authors" by Mark Seinfelt