Suicide in a Story

Suicide Story in a

A Beautiful Book about a Terrible Topic

Suicide Story in a

Suicide Club,

Part 1

B

oss i ran onto a queer bunch in the back room of a saloon on william street the other night there were six of them two cockroaches a grasshopper a flea and two crickets they have what they call a suicide club not the sort our old friend r l s made famous the members which intend to kill themselves but each member of this club has committed suicide already they were once humans as i was myself at least i was a poet after they killed themselves their souls transmigrated into the bodies of the insects mentioned and so they got together and formed a club the other night the grass hopper told why he killed himself it was a misunderstanding with one i loved he said which impelled me to rash act she and i were walking down a country road and i got some gravel in one of my shoes shortly afterward we boarded a trolley car would you mind i asked her if i took my shoe off and shook out the gravel help yourself she said just as i got my shoe off we passed a glue factory i hastily put the shoe on again by the time it was on again we were well past the glue factory the period during which the shoe was off and the period during which we were passing the glue factory exactly synchronized she did not see the glue factory and refused to believe there had been one in the neighborhood i could never explain a month later i killed myself tough luck old top said flea i will now tell you why i took the fatal plunge to be continued

I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying).

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Suicide Club,

Part 2

C

ontinued from thursdays paper yes said the flea i will tell you how it was i committed suicide and trans-

migrated into the body of an insect i was the india rubber man in a circus side show and fell in love with a pair of beautiful siamese twins public opinion was against me marrying both of them although both of them loved me as i loved them both you must choose between them said the manager what god has joined together let no man put asunder i said but public opinion was too much for me but the surgical operation which severed them changed their dispositions you cannot fool with without running some such risk when they were cut apart one of them eloped with the surgeon who had done the work and the other married an interne in the hospital they had a double wedding and i slew myself that night well said one o the crickets i will now tell you how i shuffled off this moral coil and transmigrated into the body of a cricket and became a member of this suicide club to be continued

Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship between individual thought and suicide. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps.

Of an apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told that he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and that that experience had “undermined� him.

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Suicide Club,

Part 3

C

ontinued from yesterdays paper yes said the first cricket i will tell you how it was i committed suicide and my soul transmigrated into the body of an insect and i became a member of this has been club my father belonged to a religious sect which forbids shaving and i was brought up in that way no razor ever touched my face when i was forty years old i had a beard that hung down to my knees it was red and glossy i went around the country posing as a doctor for a medicine company hitting the tank towns in a wagon and giving a spiel and playing on the banjo i did well as my beard attracted crowds and was happy prosperous until one day a malignant man who had just bought six bottles of tonic for five dollars made of roots herbs and natures own remedies containing no mineral ingredients and brewed from juniper leaves hazel roots choke cherries and the bark of the wild cohosh exactly as the indians made it for a thousand years in the unpathed forests before the pale face came said to me mister can i ask you a question yes i said i have nothing to conceal i am on the level if one wine glass full before meals does not give you an appetite take two or three mister he says the question is personal go ahead i says i am the seventh son of a seventh son a soothsayer and a seer i can tell by the way you chew tobacco you have liver trouble i will make a special price to you fourteen bottles for ten dollars cash no he said it is about your beard it grew i told him through using this medicine my chin was bald at birth it is a specific for erysipelas botts neuralgia stomach trouble loss of appetite hearts disease dandruff and falling hair thirty bottles to you for twenty dollars and i will throw in an electric belt mister he said i only want to ask

you if you sleep with all your beard outside of the covers under the covers when you go to bed at night and he gives me an evil grin and went on i never thought of it before and just had gone to bed and slept as a rule but that night when i climbed into bed i thought o the old mans question i spread all my beard outside of the covers and it was immediately apparent to me that i did not have the habit of sleeping with it that way then i put it under the covers and was no less certain that i did not sleep with it that way i worried about it till morning and each way i put it seemed at once to be the wrong way the next night it was the same thing i could not keep from thinking about it i got no sleep at all and became the mere shadow of my former self it so preyed upon me that at last i saw i must either shave off the beard or end it all but i could not shave off the beard without deserting the religious principles instilled into me by my father and so i took the fatal plunge hard lines said the second cricket i will now relate the circumstances which led up to my suicide to be continued

There are many causes for a suicide, and generally the most obvious ones were not the most powerful. Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through reflection. What sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable. Newspapers often speak of “personal sorrows” or of “incurable illness.” These explanations are plausible. But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him indifferently.

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Suicide Club,

Part 4

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ontinued from last saturdays paper well said the second cricket the way i happened to commit suicide and undergo transmigration and thus qualify for a member of this club was this when i was a human i was wedded to a lady whose mother had a very strong and domineering character she lived with us night after night i would lie awake thinking up schemes to get even with her i thought up some lovely schemes but when morning came my nerve would leave i never had the courage to put them into execution finally the thought came to me that if i was a ghost i could haunt her and she would no come back i slew myself but alas my soul transmigrated into the body of a cricket and if you had ever seen that strong and bitter old woman slaying spiders and crickets you could realize the despair that has settled down on me since too bad said one of the cockroaches i will now narrate the events which led up to my determination to take the leap into the darkness to be continued

In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let’s not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that “is not worth the trouble.� Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.

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Suicide Club,

Part 5

C

continued from tuesdays paper i cant say the first of the two cockroaches remarked that i had any good reason for slaying myself i had done everything else at least once i was a young man possessed of a co n siderable fortune wh ic h it w as m y only occupation to dissipate when everything else palled i took up theology i made a bet with another student that the soul was not immortal the only way to settle it was to die and find out we both did well fellows we both lost mine p ro v ed to be immortal for h e r e i a m bu t his was not completely disappeared and has never been heard o again which shows you never can tell and yet i am still interested in games o chance my story said th e second cockroach break in g in is fa r more interesting and far sadder i will narrate it to be concluded in my next

What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life?

A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger.

His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.

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Assisting at a

Suicide

W

ell boss i have just been assisting at a suicide i think the gentleman who killed

himself was quite right to do so too i went into the kitchen of an up town hotel the other evening for a bite to eat and after i had dined i thought i would look the place over and if i found a room that appealed to me i would spend the night there the room i got into was already infested by a little old bald headed fellow with scared eyes and a face like a petrified turnip who was hunched up under a reading lamp reading a bible all of a sudden he gave a jump and said gawd gawd there it is again i saw a puff of smoke floating across the table in front of him it seemed to come from nowhere in particular smoke smoke cried the old man i am haunted by smoke and as he spoke another puff of smoke suddenly appeared from nowhere on the table in front of him gawd gawd he cried spare me spare me do not persecute me this way and i will give all the money to charity i will give it to the red cross or any church you may designate i know i did wrong to burn down that building for the insurance money but how was i to know there was anyone in it i did not plan a murder a third puff of smoke seemed to start out of his own shoulder and floated in front of his eyes and a fourth puff hit him on his bald head and made a little veil in front of his face gawd gawd he cried and threw himself on the rug and began to pray with his face hidden i thought to myself those puffs of smoke are peculiar there isn’t anything on fire in here and then i got a whiff of it and it smelled like tobacco smoke then i saw something that looked like a gray globe floating from the direction of the bathroom door it drifted across the room and hit the reading lamp and vanished with a

puff of smoke looked at the bathroom door and thought i heard some one chuckle over there and then i saw another gray globe of smoke forming at the keyhole it detached itself from the door and floated across the room i crawled noiselessly under the bath room door it was one of those bath rooms between two sleeping rooms and there were a couple of chuckle headed young fellows sitting on the floor laughing to themselves both were about half soused and they were having a good time one of them had a slender hollow brass curtain rod and he was soaping the end of it and sticking it into the keyhole then he would fill his mouth with cigarette smoke and blow a soap bubble which drifted into the old mans room what is he doing now said one of them he is on the floor praying said the other taking the rod out of the keyhole and looking through let me blow a couple said the first young man you are too soused said the first one gawd gawd said the voice from the room i had just left i am haunted by ghostly smoke i will live right all the rest of my life if you only let me off this time give him another bubble said the first young man he has got it coming to him evidently so they gave him half a dozen more bubbles the noise in the haunted mans room ceased for some minutes what is he doing now said the first young man i cant see him said the second one just then there came a kicking kind of a noise on the wall i went into the haunted mans room and found his closet door was open i went in and he was just dying he had hanged himself to a hook on the wall with a trunk cord those two young fellows had just the wrong man for their little practical joke or just the right man if you want to look at it that way i went away from there at once not wishing to be on hand if there was any investigation yours for conscience and coincidence and may they never meet

In the face of such contradictions and obscurities must we conclude that there is no relationship between the opinion one has about life and the act one commits to leave it? Let us not exaggerate in this direction. In a man’s attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world. The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s, and the body shrinks from annihilation.

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, the fatal evasion that constitutes the third theme of this essay, 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.

Thus everything contributes to spreading confusion. Hitherto, and it has not been wasted effort, people have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments.

One merely has to refuse to be misled by the confusions, divorces, and inconsistencies previously pointed out. One

must brush everything aside and go straight to the real problem. One kills oneself because life is not worth living, that is certainly a truth - yet an unfruitful one because it is a truism. But does that insult to existence, that flat denial in which it is plunged come from the fact that it has no meaning?

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80% of peop treatment for d treated su

Research has shown medications and therapy to be effective suicide prevention.

Suicide can be prevented through education and public awareness.

The strongest risk factor for suicide is depression.

ple that seek depression are uccessfully.

Last year SAVE received 810 requests for information from 72 countries.

Last year SAVE educated 10,618 youth & parents on depression and suicide prevention.

Each suicide produces at least six, and as many as hundreds of “survivors,� or people left behind to grieve. Based on the 766,042 suicides from 1982 through 2007, it can be estimated that the number of survivors in the U.S. is 4.6 million. (AAS)

Suicide is a very serious issue, before taking that final step consider talking to someone who has beeen there and found their way back, it could make all the difference. If you know someone you believe to be dealing with suicidal thoughts or actions, talk to them and provide support, you could be the person to turn their life around. At the end of the day remember all life matters.

Colophon: Text by: Don Marquis,The annotated Archy & Mehitabel Albert Camus, Absurdity & Suicide Facts found at: http://www.save.org/index. cfm?fuseaction=home.viewpage&page_ id=705d5df4-055b-f1ec-3f66462866fcb4e6 http://www.spanusa.org/index. cfm?fuseaction=home.viewPage&page_ id=0D213AD4-C50A-1085-4DD96CE0EEED52A0 www.afsp.org/files/College_Film/factsheets.pdf Illustartions by Nakware Howard, & Inspired by http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http:// www.acf.org/images/American_Chestnut_Tree. jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.acf.org/Legacy_Tree. php&usg=__T1LRwmoogmAV-fDWGoXpVmBsj98 =&h=315&w=295&sz=30&hl=en&start=0&zoom= 1&tbnid=PI5AN4f_EHTqMM:&tbnh=130&tbnw=12 2&ei=7ns0Tf_ML472gAe38bCgCw&prev=/images %3Fq%3Dtree%26hl%3Den%26biw%3D1889%26 bih%3D970%26gbv%3D2%26tbs%3Disc h:1&itbs =1&iact=rc&dur=291&oei=7ns0Tf_ML472gAe38b CgCw&esq=1&page=1&ndsp=55&ved=1t:429,r:1 6,s:0&tx=80&ty=55

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