Thoughts on suicide

"Another was that he belonged with the suicides. And here it must be said that to call suicides only those who actually destroy themselves is false. Among these, indeed, there are many who in a sense are suicides only by accident and in whose being suicide has no necessary place. Among the common run of men there are many of little personality and stamped with no deep impress of fate, who find their end in suicide without belonging on that account to the type of suicide by inclination; while, on the other hand, of those who are to be counted as suicides by the very nature of their beings are many, perhaps the majority, who never in fact lay hands on themselves.

The 'suicide', and Harry was one, need not necessarily live in a peculiarly close relationship to death. One may do this without being a suicide. What is peculiar to the suicide is that his ego, rightly or wrongly, is felt to be extremely dangerous, dubious, and doomed by nature; that he is always in his own eyes exposed to an extraordinary risk, as though he stood with the slightest foothold on the peak of a crag whence a slight push from without or an instant's weakness from within suffices to precipitate him into the void.

The line of fate incase of these men is marked by their belief that suicide is their most probable manner of death. It might be presumed that such temperaments, which usually manifest themselves in early youth and persist through life, show a singular defect of vital force. On the contrary, among the 'suicides' are to be found unusually tenacious and eager and also courageous natures. But just as there are those who at the least indisposition develop a fever, so do those whom we call suicides, and who are always very emotional and sensitive, develop at the least shock the notion of suicide....."

 "....he found consolation and support ... in the idea that the way to death was open to him at any moment. It is true that with him, as with all men of his kind, every shock, every pain, every untoward predicament at once called forth the wish to find escape in death. By degrees, however, he fashioned for himself out of this tendency a philosophy that was actually serviceable to life. He gained strength through familiarity with the thought that the emergency exit stood always open, and became curious, too, to taste his suffering to the bitter end. If it ever went too badly with him he could feel sometimes with a grim malicious pleasure:'I am curious to see all the same just how much a man can endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to open the door to escape.' There are a great many suicides to whom this imparts an uncommon strength. On the other hand, all suicides are familiar with the struggle against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be felled by life than by one's own hand. Knowing this, with a morbid conscience of so-called self-contented persons, the majority of suicides are left to a protracted struggle against their temptation. The struggle as the kleptomaniac against his own vice.

The Steppenwolf was not unfamiliar with this struggle. He had engaged in it with many a change of weapons. Finally, at the age of forty-seven or thereabouts, a happy, but not harmless, idea came to him from which he derived some amusement. He appointed his fiftieth birthday as the day on which he might allow himself to take his own life. On this day, according to his mood, so he agreed with himself, it should be open to him to employ the emergency exit or not. Let happen to him what might, illness, poverty, suffering, and bitterness, there was a time limit. It could not extend beyond these few years, months, days whose number daily diminished. And in fact he bore much adversity, which previously would have cost him severe and longer tortures and shaken him perhaps to the roots of his being, very much more easily. When for any reason it went particularly bad with him, when peculiar pains and penalties were added to the desolateness and loneliness and savagery of his life, he could say to his tormentors; 'Only wait, two years and I am your master.'.."