… with whom UD‘s old friend Peter Galbraith worked on the peace accord when Peter was ambassador to Croatia, has died.
Peter always described Holbrooke as so hard-nosed a character that UD wondered how the two of them – Peter and Holbrooke – could be in a room together without the room imploding.
… kills herself, leaving a last Facebook image of a bloodied hand from Madame Butterfly.
… 39 year old Roxana Briban chose to leave the world stage in a spectacular way, somehow inspired by the great tragic heroines she embodied on stage… One of the last messages Roxana Briban posted on Facebook is dated Wednesday four minutes before midnight and posts an image with a bloody hand, from Madame Butterfly, a part she … sang in 2008 for the National Opera.
The last messages Roxana posted online are [YouTubes of] Casta Diva from Norma by Vincenzo Bellini, and the staggering finale of Verdi’s La Traviata, where Violetta dies.
**********************************
It means you want to make an intellectual spectacle of yourself. You have something urgent to say to the world, a final truth, and you want the world to notice you and what you have to say.
Mitchell Heisman has accomplished this, somewhat. Before shooting himself in the head in front of tourists and students in the Yard, he emailed to hundreds of academics a long manuscript titled Suicide Note.
Although Heisman’s suicide was his own, with his own specific miseries and obsessions, he’s given us something broadly valuable in Suicide Note. Suicide is traumatic and mysterious for the rest of us; when someone about to do himself in writes at length about why, we can profit from it.
I’ve only read the last few chapters of Heisman’s note; they contain the core of his convictions.
I rage at the entire cosmos for having no ultimate meaning.
Heisman’s nihilism was acute, extreme. His super-rationalism insisted that in the absence of any obvious, overarching point to human existence, one might as well end things. He describes, quite tellingly, his experience of “reductionist collapses” – moments in his life when all of the emotions, faiths, myths, and attachments we generate to give ourselves pleasure and purpose crash to bits. With “my analytic tendencies,” Heisman explains, “I could take myself apart in some ways, but I could not put myself back together.”
In a desperate reconstitution-experiment, Heisman begins listening to Bach:
Bach bounds me to the earth enough so that I can function as a living human being. Bach is ground from outside of myself that makes up for the nihilistic lack of ground within myself.
The choice of Bach is significant: Heisman seeks order, narrative, feeling, in a disordered, fluctuating, emotionless cosmos, and Bach is the most ordered of composers.
But Bach – a deeply religious man – doesn’t last long. Heisman’s “unadulterated material objectivity” sees the crutch, the lie, in his consort with Bach. “The progress of reason leads to nihilism,” he concludes; “there is no fundamentally rational basis for choosing life over death.”
Heisman’s hypertrophic rationalism allows him no non-rational or even semi- or weakly-rational basis for existence. He is an intellectual fanatic, demanding all or nothing — a fully meaningful world according to strictly rational laws, or forget about it.
Places like universities – locations packed with people invigorated rather than depleted by analytic tendencies – must be unmasked as the contemptibly false consolations that they are. So you travel to the local pinnacle of human thought – Harvard University – and point your gun at both sources of your misfortune: the life of the mind, and your particular mind.
… brain dead. She now officially declares the University of New Mexico brain dead.
Cerebral function slowed badly beginning in 2007, with the hiring of President Dave Schmidly; it deteriorated further a year later, with football coach Mike Locksley.
Surviving on-campus synapses were beaten to a pulp by Mistress Jade.
… translating physics is charming, smart, wonderful.
He was one of the three people killed near the University of Georgia yesterday.
UD thanks David for the link.
… Ms. Hunter told investigators that Mr. Hughes had become distressed about one particular subject — discord between his sister and their stepmother, Carol Hughes. The two women have quarreled in recent years over the estate of Ted Hughes. Neither Ms. Hunter nor Frieda Hughes, herself a poet, painter and author in England, responded to requests for comment.
The girlfriend of Nicholas Hughes reports on a possible element of his depression.