Standing still at an eery, dark wall, seeing nothing beyond it, even for days at a time, is better to be at that wall than allowing that dark wall to overcome you. That dark wall shouldn't keep you from getting by it -- it's only the enemy's wall, not the wall of your master.
Even when you're darkly alone and deeply sad, at least you still have yourself. As hated as you might feel about yourself, there's still the real you, in there. Sometimes, you are all you can count on, with God (though we can feel even He's abandoned us), at that dark wall. Sometimes it is up to us alone to keep going despite the darkest darkness, life itself seeming to be happy to take us down. Sometimes it is only us who can keep the darkness from completing that dark wall.
The NY Times Magazine included, near the end of 2008, an essay about a fortysomething writer, David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide during 2008. He was one who happened to be considered one among the greatest writers of his generation. He was born in the early 1960s (roughly my older sister's age).
Consider the Philosopher (from NY Times Magazine)
Like his peers Richard Powers and William T. Vollmann, Wallace wrote big, brainy novels that were encyclopedically packed with information and animated by arcane ideas. In nonfiction essays, he tackled a daunting range of highbrow topics, including lexicography, poststructuralist literary theory and the science, ethics and epistemology of lobster pain.
To read his acutely self-conscious, dialectically fevered writing was often to witness the agony of cognition: how the twists and turns ofthought can both hold out the promise of true understanding and become a danger to it.
You ought to read Wallace, find something of his that you enjoy, because he was a very talented writer: Do not consider his ending as anything but a private tragedy for him and those closest to him, and least of all, as any kind of reasoning to do the same. Also, don't reject his work for any reason but reader's preference. His, or any other suicide, is mere tragedy and not evidence of anything but that sometimes even the most active and creative minds cannot hack this world, for a variety of reasons.
Darkness is often a creative advisor to the artist; it is no reason for them or anyone else to allow that darkness to own them, ever, for anyone. If that's the fight that living is about, then it is a good fight: to beat the darkness is noble.
Always, when I hear of such noted and talented people committing the ultimate act of desperation to escape their pain, I am at once saddened and in awe. Not a good awe: I worry that somewhere, someone -- some confused, lonely, disparaged-feeling youth, for instance -- will use that act as inspiration to commit suicide themselves, or to commit some other awful act.
The worst thing about Ernest Hemingway, aside from his habitual drinking (which is said to have been the reason he did the the following), was his suicide. It is hard to respect such a person -- people who are not victims of the world, but purveyors of life -- when they do away with themselves. Sadly, Hemingway had promised his eldest son (this is confirmed by the son in at least one documentary), that he would not kill himself, and then did so, anyways. It flies in the face of the moral and/or life lessons of Hemingway's works, when one considers how "Papa" chose to end his life. The work could be simply just so much preaching without even allegories, let alone life examples, to sustain it in such a case. But the work, each on its own, deserves to be given a chance. The work can be more than the man, since men are fleeting, while their work, ironically, need not be.
Suicide was David Foster Wallace's final act; it was not a worthy or notable act: It was a wholly tragic action that ended a life of interesting thinking and writing. The final act ought to be held very separate from his work. Hiding his suicide is not practical (here I am considering the plight for literature teachers, since including Wallace in the works read by their students, they should address his self-inflicted death, as they might Hemingway's, et al); separating the suicide and the work is legitimate and I think necessary. One's works are not destroyed once one is gone, no matter the reason. Dwelling on the suicide, on the other hand, makes the work somehow all clues to his decision to end it. That is misleading, if not needlessly macabre. But it does affect the work when such a writer (or other artist) commits suicide, since prose of the kind by Wallace is, actually, very personal and individual work. It's not pulp fiction or light fiction.
Were the motivations for the suicide coming across in the work? The casual reader will not care; the voracious reader, the aspiring or professional writer, the instructor, and the scholar would likely care. Those who wish to understand the processes of writers will care, at least to some degree. I care, for one. A fiction writer's mind is the primary tool of the trade, and if that mind discovers a place from which it cannot return, for some reason, that's relevant. How, depends. Outside of writing and writers and readers, what of the fellow sufferers of depression and whatever else the tragic artist suffered with -- are they looking for some insight into their own problems in reading his work?
The maudlin, depressed, abused, or deeply disenchanted youth might wonder how the work related to the suicide, and that could be opening an unfortunate door. Gee, he was brilliant, and he offed himself; what am I sticking around for?
Successful novelists and essayists are not exactly common, while wannabes are. Those who do writing the way Wallace did are even less common.
In the film Infamous, one of the two flicks about Truman Capote while he was working on his best-known book, a friend of Capote's comments about the curious, romantic idea of "dying a little." In an interview the friend is doing within the film's context, he states that Capote's work was such an effort that, in his commitment to his work Capote died a little, that a piece of him was taken forever. After In Cold Blood, little was left; he did nothing comparable afterward.
Alternately, perhaps Capote simply didn't have another one in him. Certainly he was psychologically and emotionally drained by the stresses of his In Cold Blood experiences, but was it that a piece of him had died? Perhaps a piece of him was finally in place!
Perhaps it was Wallace's mental and emotional pain that put him directly against that dark wall, with no way around it, and he gave in. Perhaps there was no relevant, direct connection to his efforts in his astute prose, or anything else, in his suicide. Perhaps there are no hints of that which did him in, in his work. Or, not.
But perhaps it is too romantic a notion that it wasn't his work that helped along Wallace's pain, and, at the same time, it is depression or another mental condition that sees some artists "die a little" with each piece of worthy work that they do, whether it was Capote, Hemingway, Wallace, or any of the countless others whose lives either found suicide or an inexplicable end to their once great productivity. Is there an expense for every item, a Newtonian law for talent and torture? It hardly seems to be universal.
I'd read that Wallace was despondent in his later days. His photographer wife -- who found his body -- noted that in her comments after his death.
Perhaps his suicide was also -- and chiefly -- a product of his being a man who insisted on thinking, then writing, with some intense clarity, not just following some popular line of belief. In other words, he worked harder at it than most, whether you like the result or not. Those who work too hard, especially at things such as perfecting prose -- I suggest do indeed die just a little in the process. It has a lot to do with the individual.
Solzhenitsyn lived to be 89, and he wasn't
phoning it in.
I wonder, in Wallace's case (and many others'), if he'd worked himself into that place, in his writing or his mind's workings, or if it was some sort of natural -- tragic and cruel, but natural -- process of plummeting into depression that led him there. You see, depression can, in its mystery, be concocted in a variety of ways. Intentional? I won't argue that. Self-destructive? In some part, perhaps. When your own mind is one of your worst enemies, though, its a bit unfair to say someone brought it upon themselves. And that would be ignorant, to boot.
I would expect his wife and family, and his fans, too, take his death as a tragic ending to his life, and not a final message from him, lacking the usual artful prose.
I pray that anyone who stands at that dark wall, seeing nothing beyond it, not choose to let that wall bring them down, but await the dark wall clearing as if it were a mere fog. Patience, child: believe that life does not conclude at the walls, but continues beyond them.
- Jon O
[revised, Sept. 2010.]
