L'Appel du Vide 2

Having survived my Rainier adventure a couple of weeks back (all four of us summited and the biggest problem was waiting behind other climbers on the fixed rope pitches), I thought I would return to my post on the appeal of the void.

Here is the first one for a refresher.

Though I cannot stress enough how little l'appel du vide has to do with suicide for me, I am reminded of a section of Walker Percy's book Lost in the Cosmos. I will quote at some length, and allow me an ever so brief preface to this passage that notes it is potentially vastly offensive. I will try to clean that up after the fact.

Thought Experiment: A new cure for depression:The only cure for depression is suicide. 

This is not meant as a bad joke but as the serious proposal of suicide as a valid option. Unless the option is entertained seriously, its therapeutic value is lost. No threat is credible unless the threatener means it. . . The therapeutic rationale, which has never been questioned, is that depression is a symptom. A symptom implies an illness; there is something wrong with you. . . Now, call into question the unspoken assumption. . . Assume that you are quite right. You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. . . You live in a deranged age--more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea who he is or what he is doing.

Begin with the reverse hypothesis, like Copernicus and Einstein. You are depressed because you should be. You are entitled to your depression. In fact, you'd be deranged if you were not depressed. . . Now consider, not the usual therapeutic approach, but a more ancient and honorable alternative, the Roman option. I do not care for life in this deranged world, it is not an honorable way to live; therefore, like Cato, I take my leave. Or, as Ivan said to God in The Brothers Karamazov: if you exist, I respectfully return my ticket.
Now notice that as soon as suicide is taken as a serious alternative, a curious thing happens. To be or not to be becomes a true choice, where before you were stuck with to be. Your only choice was how to be least painfully, either by counseling, narcotizing, boozing, groupizing, womanizing, man-hopping, or changing your sexual preference. 

If you are serious about the choice, certain consequences follow. Consider the alternatives. Suppose you elect suicide. Very well. You exit. Then what? What happens after you exit? Nothing much. Very little, indeed. After a ripple or two, the water closes over your head as if you had never existed. You are not indispensable, after all. . . Your lawyers will be pleased. Your psychiatrist will be displeased. The priest or minister or rabbit will say a few words over you and down you will go on the green tapes and that's the end of you. In a surprisingly short time, everyone is back in the rut of his own self as if you had never existed.

Now, in the light of this alternative, consider the other alternative. You can elect suicide, but you decide not to. What happens? All at once, you are dispensed. Why not live, instead of dying? You are free to do so. You are like a prisoner released from the cell of his life. You notice that the door to the cell is ajar and the sun is shining outside. Why not take a walk down the street? Where you might have been dead, you are alive. The sun is shining. . .

In what way have you been freed by the serious entertainment of your hypothetical suicide? Are you not free for the first time in your life to consider the folly of man, the most absurd of all the species, and to contemplate the cosmic mystery of your own existence? And even to consider which is the more absurd state of affairs, the manifest absurdity of your predicament: lost in the Cosmos and no news of how you got into such a fix or how to get out--or the even more preposterous eventuality that news did come from the God of the Cosmos, who took pity on your ridiculous plight and entered the space and time of your insignificant planet to tell you something.

The consequences of entertaining suicide? Lying on the beach, you are free for the first time in your life to pick up a coquina and look at it. You are even free to go home and, like the man from Chicago, dance with your wife. 

The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning:

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. 

The ex-suicide opens the front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.

I want to note right away that I don't think Percy means this facetiously, glibly, facilely, or any other way that might allow us to dismiss this right out of hand. Percy was well-acquainted with the horrors of depression and lost his own father to suicide. He is not being flippant here, but reminding us of something: the mere fact that maintaining life is a choice--an active choice in this thought experiment--means that every day we choose to be alive. The choice to be alive, to stare the world and it's absurdity and degradation and derangement in the face and choosing to stay, is a liberating experience. It could be otherwise, but I choose this.

While I have never struggled with suicidal thoughts nor depression I think this is what the appeal of the void means to me. It is an active choice to stay in life, to look at the temptations of the big jump but not take it. Which is why I have always sensed these moments as liberating. You mean I am not petrified by the thought of death? Sweet. You mean I don't want to jump, though? Even better.