Category: Suicide
-
Merton the Conflicted
Thomas Merton's sense of the reality of the Unseen Order was weak and underdeveloped because of the strong lure of the secular — to which, however, he never entirely succumbed, pace the thesis of David D. Cooper's excellent but mistaken Thomas Merton's Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist (University of Georgia Press,…
-
Is It Always Morally Wrong to Take One’s Own Life? Part I
A reader poses a question: A 45 year old lady wants to kill herself. This is not a view that she has come to lightly. She has been thinking about suicide fairly systematically for the last five years – ever since she turned forty in fact. She can think of reasons to live – her…
-
Time Was . . .
. . . when I had space for books, but no money. Now it's the other way around. So I allowed myself only two purchases today at the antiquarian Mesa Bookshop in downtown Mesa, Arizona, Gary Wills' slim volume, Saint Augustine, Viking 1999, and Joseph Agassi's Faraday as Natural Philosopher, University of Chicago Press, 1971. …
-
Suicide, Drafts, and Street Corners
I have been reading Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living, Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009. I gather that Pavese was obsessed life-long with the thought of suicide. Entry of 8 January 1938: There is nothing ridiculous or absurd about a man who is thinking of killing himself being afraid of falling under a car…
-
Saturday Night at the Oldies: A Couple of Suicide Songs
Tastes in music are pretty much generationally-rooted. Just to yank (tug?) Dale Tuggy's chain a bit, I said to him while we were rooming together in Prague, that the heavy metal stuff he likes is "music to pound out fenders by," a phrase that Edward Abbey (1927-1989) applied to all rock music. I claimed heavy…
-
The Morality of Suicide
There is a well-informed discussion of the topic at Auster's place. I have serious reservations about Lawrence Auster's brand of conservatism, reservations I may air later, but for now I want to say that I admire him for his courage in facing serious medical troubles and for soldiering on in the trenches of the blogosphere. He…
-
One Problem with Suicide
Suicide is a permanent solution to what is often a merely temporary problem.