My Friend's Suicide

In Edwin Arlington Robinson’s much-anthologized poem “Richard Cory,” the title character, a man blessed with wealth, a man admired and respected, “ schooled in every grace,” and “always human when he talked,” goes home “one calm summer night” and puts “a bullet in his head.” That poem, and the mystery it contains, became staggeringly real to me when last week, one calm autumn evening, a colleague and a friend, a man blessed with the wealth of imagination and an intellect that pierced to the heart of things, a man graced with a gift for writing poetry, a man respected and admired and, while never on social terms with mediocrity, always human when he talked, walked into the woods and, emulating Richard Cory, took his own life .

Upon hearing of his suicide, I asked the question that I think most people ask on similar occasions: why? A moment’s reflection, however, convinced me that such a question, because it gestures toward the irrationality of the act, is impertinent. The decision to end one’s life, so momentous in its conception, so final in its outcome, must be more than an impulse-imbued act lacking in deliberative judgment, must have a compelling reason, a reason perfectly clear, perfectly sensible, a reason that it is not our business to know. Trish Crap, in “Moon Poem,” writes that “life leans/ and fattens, one part joy/ two parts loss, and our job/ is to make it come out even.” For whatever reason, my friend had decided that he could not strike a balance. For whatever reason, he decided that while life may have a rhythm, it had no melody; that it had a grammar, but no catalyzing words. For whatever reason, he decided to stop inhaling time, for its back-of-the-throat taste had grown acrid and unsavory. For whatever reason, he decided that life had become too small because it had become too large, its possibilities somehow thwarted, his love for it somehow unrequited. For whatever reason he decided it no longer deserved tribute and the silvered notes of heraldic trumpets—and respect demands that we leave off being cognitive voyeurs, looking for the sense of it all to quell our own curiosity, our own fear, and acknowledge that reason, even if it is not given us to know it.

But more than impertinent, the question why is futile, unanswerable. Neuroscientists tell us that we are born with a “Theory of Mind” and with a capacity for empathy. We are innately capable of ascertaining the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of others, of predicting their actions and reactions, of imaginatively locating ourselves in their place. But we do this only on analogy with our own minds; we impute and predict and empathize only from our perspective. What can we ever know, C. S. Lewis asks, “of other people’s souls—of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles?” We simply cannot penetrate, directly and immediately, the minds of others. We cannot access their subjectivity, their felt experience of being, cannot inhabit their anger or fear or joy, cannot feel the assault of their despair or anxiety, cannot feel their islanded remoteness. At best we can know only fragments. It cannot be otherwise unless we know all the places, and events, and people that were and are meaningful to, did and do contribute to, the person we say we know.

How little we know of others. Literature has continually taught us the essential unknowability of others: the masquerade in Fielding’s Tom Jones; the inscrutability of Melville’s Bartleby or the impossibility of trust in his The Confidence Man; the theme of concealment, of hidden pasts and hidden motives in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility; Shakespeare’s Iago, Poe’s “The Cask of Amantillado,” “Ligeia,” and “A Man of the Crowd;” Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert; Conrad’s Verloc in The Secret Agent, Prufrock’s anguished “That’s not it at all, that’s not what I meant at all;” DeLillo’s Richard Elster in Point Omega, the held-at-arm’s reticence of Sethe at unveiling her past in Morrison’s Beloved. All these, and many, many more, teach us that human behavior is more complex, more opaque, more cabined, that we are perhaps prepared to admit. The affective experience and the behavior of each individual is multisourced, overwritten, a palimpsest of traces and annotations. It is at once micro and macro history.

So, where does that leave us? Where does my friend’s suicide leave me? Perhaps it leaves us, me, questioning whether we know even ourselves as intimately as we believe we do. Perhaps it confronts us with our own darkness. As Marlowe, in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, observes “it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence . . . its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone.” Perhaps it tells us that the imposture that all is normal, all is well, can no longer hold. Perhaps it leads us to realize that the Exodus has yet to be completed, that we still wander, still seek the pillar of fire that will light our way to a barely-glimpsed, ever-receding Canaan. Perhaps we will heed the call of the trained mynah birds in Aldous Huxley’s Island to pay attention to the “Here and now!” Perhaps it will make us see, with Matthew, that our treasure lies where our heart is, and we will hoard those we love. Perhaps it will make us take stock, take inventory, liquidate last year’s, last week’s, yesterday’s models of thinking and being. Perhaps it will convince us to lift our heavy eyelids and scan the horizon for some gleam, some bright innuendo, that will draw us away, even if momentarily, from the dark, dark prose of the world. Perhaps. Maybe.

Two weeks before he took his life, my friend sent me an email to tell me he was reading the essays in my blog, that he liked them, and was considering creating a blog himself. He included, “for what it’s worth,” he said, a new poem. It was a searing and satirical indictment of the peculiar dynamics of American pretense, of our propensity to proclaim our virtue, our “Unimpeachable Goodness,” to counter “the weight of our emptiness.” It noted that lately “the real is straining against belief,” and that straining “real” urges us to peer “into the thicket of the human heart.” Since his death, I have combed every word of that email and poem for some hint, some clue, some trace of what lay two weeks ahead. And while the proposed blog appears affirmative, I am haunted by the deprecatory “for what it’s worth” that introduced a poem that now, suddenly, seems troubling, ominous. Did this gifted poet somehow feel his talent ebbing? Was the poem’s satire self-directed? I don’t know, can’t know, can’t even surmise or suppose. We are all, finally, the imperfect curators of a museum we call the self, and its exhibits, while open to the public, tell only a partial story, for much, most, of the inventory remains secured in hidden rooms and basement vaults, stored away in inner recesses, inaccessible and unknowable.



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