Paul Valéry - On Suicide

OF THE PEOPLE who commit suicide, some do violence to themselves; others, on the contrary, merely give in to them­ selves and appear to follow some unknown and fatal line of destiny.
The first are victims of circumstance; the second victims of their own nature, and all the rewards of their outward lot will not turn them from that shortest of paths.

One can imagine a third kind of suicide. Some men look at life so coldly and guard their freedom of action so jealously that they are not willing to allow the uncertainties of health and external events to determine their death. Old age, accident, and catastrophe are things they cannot bear.
Among the ancients there are a few examples of such in­ human firmness, and some high praise for it.

Self-murder imposed by circumstance, which is the kind I referred to first, is usually thought of by its author as an action with a clear purpose. He kills himself when he is helpless to eliminate one particular evil.

He can strike at the offending part only by destroying his entire organism. He abolishes the whole and its future in order to rid himself of the part and the present. All con­ sciousness has to be extinguished in order to snuff out one thought; he abolishes his whole sensibility because he cannot get the better of one constant or insuperable affliction.

Herod had all the newborn slaughtered because he did not know how to single out the one child whose death he sought. A man crazed by a rat gnawing in the wall where he cannot get at it burns the whole house down to rid it of the particular pest. Thus exasperation with an inaccessible spot in one s own being can provoke an act of total destruction. Desperation leads or forces one to act indiscriminately.

This kind of suicide is a wholesale solution.

It is not the only one. The history of mankind is a col­ lection of wholesale solutions. All our opinions, most of our decisions and the majority of our actions are pure expedients.
Suicide of the second kind is the inevitable act of those who do not know how to fight against chronic depression, obsessive thoughts, compulsions, or a fixation on a particu­ larly depraved or hideous image.

Minds of this kind seem to be sensitized to the image, the whole idea of self-destruction. They are like drug addicts; in their pursuit of death they display the same stubborn­ ness and anxiety, practice the same secrecy and deceit as an addict in pursuit of his drug.

Some of them do not yearn for death exactly, but for the satisfaction of a kind of instinct. Sometimes it is the manner of dying that fascinates them. A potential suicide who imagines himself hanging will never jump in the river. Drowning has no appeal. A certain carpenter took great pains to build and adjust a guillotine so as to have the pleasure of lopping off his own head neatly and efficiently.

There is something aesthetic in such a suicide—the desire to arrange one's final act with care.
All these twice mortal beings seem to carry in the dark of their soul a sleepwalking murderer, an implacable dreamer, a double who must carry out an irrevocable command. The empty, mysterious smile some of them wear is the sign of their monotonous secret and (to put it paradoxically) mani­ fests the presence of their absence. Possibly they perceive their life as an empty or painful dream that exhausts them and from which they more and more wish to wake up.
Everything strikes them as more mournful and meaningless than non-being.

I shall close these remarks by discussing a purely hypo­ thetical case. Such a thing as suicide by distraction may occur, and it would be difficult to distinguish from an accident. Say a man is handling a pistol he knows is loaded. He has neither the desire nor the idea of killing himself. But holding the firearm gives him an unexpected pleasure; the butt fits his palm, and his index finger rests on the trigger with a kind of voluptuousness. He imagines the act. He is becoming the slave of the pistol. It tempts its possessor. Absently he turns the muzzle toward himself. He points it at his temple, his mouth. And now he is almost in danger, for he is caught up in the idea of how it works, in the impetus of an act suggested by the body and carried out in the mind. The cycle of impulse tends to complete itself. His nervous system itself becomes a loaded pistol, and his finger wills to press suddenly.

A precious vase close to the edge of a table, a man stand­ ing on the lip of a parapet are both in a state of perfect equilibrium. Yet we should like to sec them a little farther away from that yawning emptiness. We have a gripping perception of the tiny difference that can precipitate a person or object to its fate. Will this little bit stop the hand of this armed man? Ifhe forgets himself, if the gun goes off, if, that is, the notion of the act wins out and is done before it can set off any arresting mechanism and a return to self-control, should we call the result suicide by lack of caution?

The victim simply allowed himself to act, and his death occurred like a slip of the tongue. He moved up little by little into a perilous region of his will, and his indulgence of !indefinable sensations of contact and power trapped him in a field of action where the probability of catastrophe is very high. He became vulnerable to the smallest error, the slightest lapse of attention. He killed himself because it was all too easy to kill himself.

I have taken time over this imaginary model of a semi-gratuitous, semi-determined act in order to suggest the precariousness of the distinctions and contrasts we try to make among perceptions, tendencies, impulses, and con­ sequences of impulses—between making happen and letting happen, between acting and undergoing—between willing and being capable. (In my example, mere capability gener­ ated the will.) It would take all the subtlety of a casuist or a disciple of Cantor to untangle from the fabric of our lives what belongs to the various agents of our destiny. Seen under the micro­ scope, the thread spun and measured out for us by the Fates is a cable whose multicolored strands cross over and under and reappear in the evolving twist that holds them and carries them on.

The collected works of Paul Valéry vol 11 Occasions