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Saturday, March 27, 2004
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WHAT MAKES LIFE WORTH LEAVING?
as Finnegans Wake asks it. Outside of painful terminal illness, I don't know. Contemplating the four student suicides this semester at New York University (1010wins.com March 10), I'm as stunned as everyone else. There's much talk of "clusters," and it does seem noteworthy that all of the students jumped. Two jumped from the same interior balcony in the university library (NYU has now placed a barrier there). There have been two student suicides at my university this year; one of them was a sorority sister of a number of women in my course in the short story. I increasingly suspect that there's a basic mental divide between people instinctively attuned to the world and people at serious odds with it and subject to sudden panics about whether they should go on existing. What I mean is that if you've never even remotely contemplated killing yourself - if you've never even remotely questioned the obvious fitness of your being in the world - there's no way you're ever going to understand a suicide. In his poem "For the Suicides," Donald Justice, who like most of us stands on the outside looking in, says as much: ...We stand, now, at the threshold, Peering in, but the passage, For us, remains obscure; ... ...At the end of your shadow There sat another, waiting, Whose back was always to us. In his final stanzas Justice is still perplexed -- though he does remark that the suicides he's known (the poem is dedicated to two of them) seem to have had divided selves, one self punishing another self, with suicide the only conceivable cessation of hostilities: When the last door had been closed, You watched, inwardly raging, For the first glimpse of your selves Approaching, jangling their keys. Musicians of the black keys, At last you compose yourselves. We hear the music raging Under the lids we have closed. For the people in New York City, there's the additional symbolic weight, in these suicides, of people falling from great heights. The New York Post ran a front-page photo of one of the NYU students falling backwards out of a highrise apartment building - a sickening reminder of the 9/11 photo of a young man falling from one of the towers. Because I feel pretty strongly about the suicidal/nonsuicidal disconnect, I doubt there's much generalizable about, say, the college experience, or the urban college experience, or the high-octane competitive urban college experience here. (The boyfriend of one of the women who jumped is quoted in the Post: "This is not about NYU,. She is not just a number or statistic - and this has nothing to do with school. This was about love.") The NYU suicides, though they shared a method, differed a good deal, from what one can tell, in motivation and circumstance. Indeed suicides have always seemed to me (in my experience of them) very fine-tuned to the people committing them; eloquent final acts, they tend to express a meticulous specificity. In 1998, Philip C.Gale, an MIT sophomore, went to a 15th-floor classroom, and, as the Boston Herald reported at the time, "drew a physics formula on a blackboard showing what happens when a body falls from a great height. Then he slammed a chair through the classroom window and jumped more than 200 feet to his death." |