I was sorry to hear of the recent suicide of David Foster Wallace, a talented novelist who battled depression for most of his life. He reminds me of others who have passed on in similar ways: polymaths, very much invested in being aware of their worlds, very much in love with life, highly intelligent and sensitive people.
Having lost several friends this way, I would like to say that I think the solutions offered to us by the philosophers and spiritual leaders of our time are not addressing our problems. Intelligent people who love life kill themselves generally because they see no point in going on because they feel the outside world is doomed, and it feeds their inner depression, which quite frankly we all have somewhere.
I think we should pay more attention to these suicides. The best artists do not design their lives as art works, but these lives and deaths are nonetheless instructive. David Foster Wallace showed a great commitment to life, to giving a darn about how things turned out, and toward a respect and reverence for life itself. If he turned away at the last minute, we should get some answers and not nebulously blame “depression” and change the channel.
He walked into a crowded exam room and opened fire before shooting himself in the head. He was taken to hospital with series (sic) head wounds and died later.
Kauhajoki mayor Antti Rantakokko confirmed that nine people were killed.
The rampage came almost a year after another gunman killed eight people and himself at a school in southern Finland, an attack that triggered a fierce debate about gun laws in the Nordic nation with deep-rooted traditions of hunting in the sub-Arctic wilderness. – Police questioned student day before massacre, The Independent, September 23, 2008
Why does this keep happening? I think literature itself can give us some answers:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. (William Wordsworth, 1807)
Imagination has taken a distant second place to what we can “prove,” with financial charts and out-of-context scientific studies. We treat life itself as a product. (Literature in turn has sadly followed this pattern as well with the rise of “literary realism” and “workshop writing,” but that’s another story.)
We should pay more attention to the works like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which hopes to show us through similar ideas in unrelated disciplines that there is an order to our universe and a way of living that complements it. I hope he rests in peace and we can remember him for what he gave to literature.