.. and author of a series of books on strength conditioning, has killed himself.

He suffered from depression.

He jumped off the roof of the New York Athletic Club.

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On the same day, an opinion piece in Emma’s city’s newspaper, The New York Times, features this phrase:

suicide is generally wrong

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Indeed the opinion piece’s headline makes the wrongness of suicide paramount. It asks:

WHAT’S WRONG WITH SUICIDE?

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This is the writer’s second column, in the last couple of days, on suicide. In neither column does he even begin to hint at a justification for the claim that suicide — assisted or non-assisted — is wrong. Let’s see if we can do that.

There is an obvious religious way in which suicide is wrong. You are born by God, you live by God, you die by God. For many religious, taking your death into your own hands is – like abortion – denying the will of God in regard to the most basic of human realities. It is a sort of grotesque disobedience, a usurpation of divine powers, essentially unforgivable in its extremity.

Other spiritual traditions may not bring so punitive and outraged a rhetoric (and indeed damnation) to suicide, but they may well see it as … not exactly wrong, but, as the Buddhist Matthieu Ricard explains:

[W]anting not to exist any longer is a delusion. It’s a form of attachment that, destructive though it is, binds you to samsara, the circle of suffering existence. When someone commits suicide, all they do is change to another state, and not necessarily a better state either.

Here, suicide is just sort of stupid, since it doesn’t accomplish the surcease you’re after. On the contrary, it almost guarantees the unpleasantness of your next go-’round.

If you’re not part of a spiritual tradition in which the will of God or karmic action prevails, in what way is suicide wrong, or ontologically mistaken, and therefore to be rejected?

Here are three possible ways: One is the harm argument; a second is the antithetical-to-life argument; and, finally, there’s the cowardice argument.

Harm: Everyone knows that suicide hurts other people. When suicides write notes (apparently Tom Emma did not), they almost always include the words I’m sorry. Weighing on their minds as suicides do the deed is the shock and despair and guilt they’re handing people who love them, and they routinely ask their forgiveness.

Just as for the religious you are, in killing yourself, denying yourself to God, for human beings you are denying yourself to them. The act is the ultimate taking. Hence, suicide is wrong because it is cruel beyond reason.

Antithetical to life: In his memoir, Experience, Martin Amis writes that “because of what I do all day ,… suicides … are antithetical.” An artist, a writer, creates, makes something out of nothing. Her material is us — living breathing human beings and their ongoing dilemmas — and she needs us to be there, to keep at it.

When we check out, we take the air out of everyone’s tires. We threaten the fundamental, unthinking commitment we’re all supposed to have to the human comedy and our part in it. Life is good… or at least interesting… or at least compelling in its pleasures. Something like that. Each suicide is thus an intimately demoralizing act for the rest of us. Why persist? Why create? Who says life is good? Suicide is wrong because in killing oneself one ontologically puts at risk all of us.

Cowardice: Old age, people like to say, is not for sissies. All of life is full of challenges and deficits and sorrows and anxieties, and old age is of course rife with them; but, as the cliché suggests, only a sissy would take the easy way out. Life, under any circumstances, is a gift. Your life is a gift to you, and to others. Suicide is wrong because its commission makes you a supreme sissy, someone whose unseemly fear of existence itself blights your very being.

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

UD would argue that none of these three arguments succeeds in marking suicide as wrong.

A USA Today reporter asks the author of Onward Christian Athletes about “college sports evangelism” post-Tressel.

[B]ig-time college sports are a mess and a poor platform for the promotion of religious virtue. The central idea of sports ministry — use sports and famous athletic figures to promote the faith — seems more problematic than ever in view of what’s happened with Coach Tressel. …With regard to the concept of using sports as a platform to promote faith … At a certain point, the platform no longer works as a vehicle to promote Christianity, because the platform is corroded and decayed.

As you know if you follow this blog, UD is about to teach a course on beauty. She has assigned, among other texts, this Oxford anthology.

As she thinks about this course, she’s writing a series of blog posts about art, aesthetics, ethics. Here are a couple of sample entries.

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The George Washington University School of Engineering, the Elliott School of International Affairs, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences — her students in this course come from all over.

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UD has also been gathering news articles of interest to people interested in beauty. There’s the Council Bluffs sculpture controversy, generating coverage from as far away as Australia. There’s the Vogue oil spread.

The wee story of the Wee Frees in Scotland isn’t about the visual realm. It involves efforts on the part of some congregants of this austere Presbyterian denomination to change the way they sing in church.

Which is acapella. And only the psalms. No hymns. No musical instruments. Just the Old Testament psalms, in unison, or sometimes with mild harmony. Sounds like this.

Here’s a whole page of their singing.

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What’s being held on to when people hold on to this as their sole musical worship?

I’m reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil while I’m here in Savannah. I’m only a couple of chapters in.

Having just visited Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home, Midnight etc. seems a good title for all of O’Connor’s work.

I’ve taught her short stories for a couple of decades, and you know what? They don’t grow on you.

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It’s not that I’ve stopped admiring the artist. No one saw better than O’Connor what a short story was, and what it could do. She powerfully influenced Don DeLillo and many others.

Her prose is stately and muscular and she can do it all: Irony…

But irony doesn’t really say it. What she’s got is a stealthy point of view, slinking among pity, amusement, disgust, horror, and indifference.

She foreshadows her outcomes elegantly, but her images amass a symbolic force that can only be called appalling.

She writes hilarious, spot-on, dialogue, but the spot she’s on about is so stupid as to be fundamentally mute.

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Above all, there’s no denying the consistency and depth of O’Connor’s denunciation of humanity.

Flannery O’Connor seems unable to forgive us for remaining elusive in regard to our own suffering and in regard to what O’Connor takes to be our salvation. Unlike the much kinder James Merrill, who writes in his poem “Santorini” that most of us cultivate “an oblivion that knows its own limits,” O’Connor believes we’re blind fools blundering through existence in the baddest of bad faith. Bestially dumb to human and spiritual realities, we receive our inevitable epiphanies as cartoonish hammer blows to the head.

Here is Flannery O’Connor on the subject of Simone Weil:

The life of this remarkable woman still intrigues me while much of what she writes, naturally, is ridiculous to me. Her life is almost a perfect blending of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny. Well Simone Weil’s life is the most comical life I have ever read about and the most truly tragic and terrible. If I were to live long enough and develop as an artist to the proper extent, I would like to write a comic novel about a woman—and what is more comic and terrible than the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth?…

By saying Simone Weil’s life was both comic and terrible, I am not trying to reduce it, but mean to be paying her the highest tribute I can, short of calling her a saint, which I don’t believe she was. Possibly I have a higher opinion of the comic and terrible than you do. To my way of thinking it includes her great courage and to call her anything less would be to see her as merely ordinary. She was certainly not ordinary. Of course, I can only say, as you point out, this is what I see, not this is what she is—which only God knows. But I didn’t mean that my heroine [in a short story or novel] would be a hypothetical Miss Weil. My heroine already is, and is Hulga. Miss Weil’s existence only parallels what I have in mind, and it strikes me especially hard because I had it in mind before I knew as much as I do now about Simone Weil. …You have to be able to dominate the existence that you characterize. That is why I write about people who are more or less primitive. I couldn’t dominate a Miss Weil because she is more intelligent and better than I am but I can project a Hulga.

At least Nabokov, in writing about Lolita, acknowledges her power over Humbert Humbert as much as her primitiveness. At least he gives Humbert moral awareness. O’Connor needs to assume a world of moral morons over whom the writer has absolute control.

Simone Weil, with her ethical profundity along with her absurdity, can’t be aesthetically dominated; she can’t be tossed so easily onto the ship of fools and made to float along with everyone else.

Of course for O’Connor Weil is a fool -a particularly pathetic one, in fact, because she exemplifies the sinful pride that lies behind trying to use your mind to understand divinity: She was a “proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth.” What I’ve always seen as most impressive and human about Weil – her attraction to faith and her resistance to it – O’Connor sees as a pitiable farce, a comic parable about human vainglory and the way it blocks our acceptance of cosmic mysteries.

I see how in extreme and self-destructive gestures like starving herself in sympathy with suffering people Weil becomes an object of interest for O’Connor, who in story after story features extremists and compulsives doing weird self-destructive things in an hilariously distorted belief that they’re being spiritual, or, even worse, doing these things out of no belief at all, but rather out of some deeply obscure, deeply stupid need for self-expression. Weil, O’Connor writes, “parallels” such characters…. Yet how unkind of O’Connor, who routinely condemns the tawdry and deluded class snobbery of characters like Mrs Turpin in “A Revelation,” to see Simone Weil, of all people, as a mere variant of that.

“To look at the worst will be for [the writer] no more than an act of trust in God,” writes O’Connor; but actually I think she means to look for the worst. It was O’Connor’s strange mission to make us trust the actions of grace even in regard to the most lost among us (the wildly popular tv series, Lost, apparently featured O’Connor’s work); yet how can I trust a writer for whom it’s always midnight in the garden of good and evil? Who cannot grant us any clarity at all?

“The reader wants his grace warm and binding, not dark and disruptive,” O’Connor writes, with characteristic dismissiveness. Instead of seeing life as one long squalid torpor disrupted by a probably fatal but somehow spiritually bracing blow to the head, the reader will insist on something different… But that something different is not necessarily the kitschy grace that O’Connor imagines we’re after.

“He allows you to see that life is full of different moods and emotions… Whatever you do… however long you live… there’s one thing you’re sure of … that you’ll go … That’s the language Purcell is wonderful at speaking…. He’s writing this devotional stuff for church, and in the middle of it you suddenly realize you’re hearing the song of an anguish.”

Pete Townshend, in this
interview, is far
better than UD‘s
been at explaining – as
she’s tried to do, all these
years on this blog – why
Henry Purcell is the fairest
one of all.

She has never studied anthropology. She has never done field work. She does not understand the people of Kansas and environs, and she never will. If you can make sense of this Kansas City Star commentary, which presents itself as a tribute to outgoing Kansas State president Jon Wefald, you’re a better man than I.

[A recently disclosed Kansas State University audit] paints Wefald, Krause and Snyder [background on these people here] as shady, clueless and drunk on power.

… My impression is that Wefald, Krause, Snyder and anyone connected to Kansas State athletics during the school’s “football powerhouse era” cashed in on the record and off. [Dump the quotation marks.]

Even Tim Weiser, who had little to do with the golden era, received a no-questions-asked $500,000 loan. Thirteen payments to Krause, Snyder, Weiser and others totaling close to $1 million cannot be accounted for or explained.

The $3 million secret buyout Krause agreed to give Ron Prince seems to be part of a pattern of financial mismanagement at K-State under Wefald’s presidency.

… “The Miracle in Manhattan” now has an enlightening postscript, “The Madoff in Manhattan.”

… My opinions of Jon Wefald and Bill Snyder have not changed. I respect them immensely. I’m astonished by their accomplishments. But I always regarded them as human and therefore flawed. Greed, arrogance and a sense of entitlement can invade their mind-set as easily as yours.  [Yeah well.  Here’s where I start getting all confused.  I don’t claim to have an unimpregnable mind-set, but – as God is my witness! – my mind-set is set at an entirely different frequency from Bernard Madoff’s…  So point one, if you’re saying any of us could do with money and power what Wefald and the others did, you can kiss my royal Irish arse.  Point two, if you retain immense respect for mad arrogant fools who steal your tax money and make your university a national joke, you are pathetic.]

… I suspect the audit would’ve remained private had Wefald and Krause not renamed Snyder as head football coach on their way out the door. Re-installing Snyder as the unofficial president of the university was/is a serious impediment to Schulz. [Let’s pause right there. Did you get that?  Did you get the point that at KSU the football coach is the real president of the university?]

… K-State’s athletic department has been completely out of control for years… [But so are you, Kansasfolk, so are you.  At least the people of Romania finally found it in themselves to get rid of the Ceausescus. And, you know, you don’t see Romanians running around today still worshipping them and finding themselves astonished by their accomplishments…]

For generations, students at the University of Texas have believed that if, on your way to a test, you see an albino squirrel on campus, you’ll get an A.

But a biology professor at UT says: “The squirrels — at least the ones I’ve seen on campus — are not true albinos… I have actually seen several color variants of squirrels on campus with light-colored hair but all with normally pigmented eyes. … There are squirrels that lack or have reduced production of eumelanin, or black pigment, which are known as amelanistic squirrels.”

Not only that, but a student comments in response to the article:

I saw an albino squirrel and had a threesome later that night ….

… that today’s the fiftieth anniversity of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures essay, she thinks first about her father.

An immunologist at the National Institutes of Health, a first-generation American embarrassed by the peasant religion his Jewish father brought from Minsk, Herbert Rapp was a belligerent empiricist.

While UD‘s mother – herself the daughter of secular Jews in the same generationally rebellious mode as UD‘s father – retained enough faith to send her children to a Reform temple in Bethesda for a few years, UD‘s father was much the stronger influence on UD.

This was in part because of his clear, principled world view, in contrast to his wife’s vague sentimentalism, but it also had to do with the soullessness of that particular temple, a hip epicenter of social justice. (I called my mother’s sister and asked her about it. “That place? The rabbi didn’t believe in God.”)

Once, my mother and my aunt, in memory of their father, decided to buy a Torah for the synagogue. The rabbi told them about some recently unearthed Czech Torahs that had been buried for safekeeping during the war.

“Your mother,” said my aunt, “went to the airport to pick it up when it came in. The next day we took it to the rabbi. He said ‘You didn’t have to bring it in so fast. You could have kept it in your home for awhile.’ Your mother said, ‘No. I didn’t like the ghosts.’ The rabbi looked at both of us and said ‘You’re pagans.'”

I have a memory – who knows if the memory is real – of my father, with great reluctance, attending the installation ceremony at the temple. As the new Torah was carried joyously through the congregation, the person holding it stopped in front of my father, assuming he in particular — after all, his family bought it — would want to kiss it. My father stood stolid and unmoving. (“I don’t remember the ceremony,” says my aunt.)

Yet he didn’t have the materialist disposition you’d think might accompany all this. He was mad for the Romantic poets, and he liked to recite T.S. Eliot. My mother says she fell in love with him because of the classical music she heard pouring out of his frat room at Johns Hopkins. He was a serious and emotional pianist who spent much of his time playing and replaying the Sonata Pathétique.  He loved nature intensely — in particular, the Chesapeake Bay, where he had a house and a boat.

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End of first half.  Must walk dog.  It’s high noon, and even though it’s dreary out there, I guess this is as light and warm as it’s going to get.  Ne quittez pas.

New York Times money columnist on Yeshiva trustee Elie Wiesel, and other cargo cultists:

[They] entrusted their life savings to a man they thought “was God,” as Elie Wiesel put it not long ago….

It [is] hard not to feel sad for … all the victims of Mr. Madoff’s evil-doing. But one also has to wonder: what were they thinking?

At a panel a month ago, put together by Portfolio magazine, Mr. Wiesel expressed, better than I’ve ever heard it, why people gave Mr. Madoff their money. “I remember that it was a myth that he created around him,” Mr. Wiesel said, “that everything was so special, so unique, that it had to be secret. It was like a mystical mythology that nobody could understand.” Mr. Wiesel added: “He gave the impression that maybe 100 people belonged to the club. Now we know thousands of them were cheated by him.”

… People did abdicate responsibility — and now, rather than face that fact, many of them are blaming the government for not, in effect, saving them from themselves…