(4)

Weeks go by.  Weeks go by and no matter what I do, no matter how I try, I cannot seem to stop myself from faltering, stumbling, tumbling deeper and deeper into depression.  The vultures are gathering; I can see them circling in the sky far above me.  What draws them near?  Boredom at work and endless worries about money account for some of my growing sense of despair, as does the fact that I can see no way of ever surmounting these problems:  I am caged; I am trapped; everywhere I look the way is barred.  Yet who is there to blame?  It is I myself who made the decisions which have led me to this place, I myself who am responsible for the stultifyingly dull routine which constitutes my existence, I who have left myself with no opportunity to exchange that routine for the stimulation of more challenging endeavors.  I who have brought into existence an uncertain future:  for I have no idea how my life will end, nor even what circumstances I will find myself in next week, next month, next year.  It would take very little in the way of misfortune for my mere survival to be brought to a point of crisis.  The loss of my job, a sudden downward turn in health, even the relatively minor affair of the sudden raising of my rent would be enough to sink me.  What will become of me as I enter into middle-age, as I grow old?  I cannot foresee a day when the circumstances of my life will ever be much improved over what they are now; and they could so easily become much worse.  Even should they remain merely the same, it will mean nothing more than the continuation of an existence whose monotony I already find to be a kind of nullification.

Nor can I bear much more in the way of psychological stress.  Not only do my present circumstances lack all guarantee with regard the basic necessities of life, there are as well none that afford me any place of genuine rest or comfort such as other people find in home or family or work.  In short, I do not find my life to be particularly pleasant.  Moreover, I find the world in which I exist to be exceedingly unpleasant, so thoroughly suffused with sorrow and suffering that the full extent of it can barely be comprehended – or, if comprehended, borne.  People are starving to death – now.  Children are being abused – now.  Women are being raped, prisoners tortured – now, and now.  Millions of animals – millions of animals – suffer and die each day to serve as food, or as vehicles of product testing and medical research, or for the mere entertainment of their human captors.  The extent of our criminality is almost incomprehensible, and yet it exists as no fantastic hyperbole; its factual proof can be everywhere found.  These crimes are happening now.  And now.  And now.  How can anyone know this and yet continue to maintain their mental and emotional equilibrium?

The vultures begin to gather; they are circling round and round somewhere far off in the distant blue.  I know them well enough, having seen them once or twice before during the course of my life.  They are still very far away, as of yet; but they are there.  Their presence cannot be denied.

I begin to think of suicide.

And it seems to me now, as it has before, those one or two other times in my life when the vultures have appeared, that suicide is not something I find myself in the process of choosing; rather, it is something which I begin to think might happen to me at some future point in time.  The fact that it is I myself who would be ending my life seems to me rather beside the point:  for suicide has about it something of the inevitable to the one who enacts it; it appears, after all, at the moment of its commitment, to be the only choice left and, as such, becomes a matter of no choice at all.  It is a fait accompli in thought long before its accomplishment in fact, and represents to the one who contemplates it nothing more than the fulfillment of one particular destiny, little different in its arbitrariness than that brought to pass by accident or disease.  Suicide, should that be my end, will not be a matter of my having chosen death.  It will simply be the form that death takes when it chooses me.

The vultures begin to circle.  They are still very distant; I can only just see their outstretched wings, their savage claws and their awesome beaks; but they are there.  Their presence cannot and will not be denied.  I watch to see if they will come closer still or draw away.  Will they drop down upon me?  In the end, I discover that I'm not particularly frightened by the prospect, and only mildly interested.  Suicide, I find, is no great drama.  It's just something that happens to people sometimes.

Then, one day while I am at work, my ideas on this subject suddenly undergo a shift; I don't know why.  I never do know what it is that causes these shifts in thinking; apparently there is much cogitation happening at a subconscious level.  There is nothing particularly special about the day.  People are coming and going at the store just as they always do, most of them regular customers engaged in the daily routine of purchasing newspapers and magazines, cigarettes and lottery tickets.  I wait on them as per usual – which is to say, with a countenance that ranges from indifferent to morose; in between times I pace restlessly back and forth behind the counter or, as is my habit sometimes, sit on the ledge formed by the row of low cupboards behind me.  I read from a book I've brought in to work, or stare out the storefront window at the traffic passing by.  What is there in any of this to explain why it is that suddenly, one fall afternoon, I lift up my head and think:  Suicide need not be an event that happens to me.  It is something I can choose, if I like.  And what is it about this thought that gives me such a sense of release, of freedom – even of hope?

The thought that suicide may be an active choice, as opposed to an event passively received, is hardly new; on the contrary, this is how suicide is most generally perceived.  Yet the idea presents an entirely fresh perspective to me.  I think that the source of the relief I've found in this perspective, the sense I have had of my depression lifting somewhat because of it, resolves back once again to the insight I discovered not so long ago via the simple phrase:  "I am Me."  I am Me – and my life is my own, no one else's; I may, in every regard, do with it as I please.  This, in short, is the difference I have perceived.  For I see now that I had not before fully appreciated this fact; rather, I had continued to believe, if not entirely consciously, that my life was not really my own.  Life, I thought, was something that had been bestowed upon me; it had been given to me as a gift and, as such, must entail certain obligations:  to my parents, to the government, to society; to all those who have played a part in bestowing upon me the gift of life, and in nurturing that life to maturity.  Was I not therefore beholden to these benefactors, and bound to agree with their assertion that there must needs arise, between myself and them, a contract, the terms of which reflect their "ownership" of my life, as well as an entailment of the obligations I must fulfill in exchange for their having bestowed it upon me?  But to take this perspective is to assume that this life of mine is but a borrowed thing, my usage of it dependent upon my willingness to obey the edicts society has set up in governance of that usage.  Forfeit my obedience, and I forfeit my freedom – even my life itself, should I break the laws of society too egregiously.  But what sophistry have I here perpetrated upon myself?  My life is not a gift that is borrowed only; I own it.  It belongs to me.

Ultimately, of course, it is to nature, not society, that I owe my life's existence; thus it is to nature that I owe my allegiance, if allegiance I give.  And yet, what care has nature if I choose to bring my life to an untimely end?  Life is, in a manner of speaking, a terminal disease:  we all of us die of it, sooner or later.  And nature is greedy for death:  that is the food upon which it lives.  I cannot see that nature would object to my ending my life a bit ahead of schedule.

Curious,  the sense of freedom this knowledge brings.  I may choose my own death, if I desire to do so.  That is my right.  Should my cares and worries become too heavy a burden for me to bear, I may simply lay that burden down.  The decision to do so is not, obviously, one to be lightly made; nor do I suggest that the option of suicide allows for the cavalier treatment of those laws which dictate human behavior within the social sphere.  If I break the laws of society, I must suffer certain consequences.  If I break the laws of nature, then too I must recognize that there may be repercussions.  But, in its essence, my life is my own.  There may yet come a time when I find my life to be an untenable proposition; should that time come, I may in fact decide that I would rather die than live.  The choice is mine to make:  therein lies my freedom.  My death, like my life, belongs to me.

THE BELIEVERS