This ridiculous act, not absurd (too big a word which might have scared them off), but flat, indifferent, this is how it becomes possible. ‘Going to bed one morning, instead of pressing the electric light switch, without paying attention, I make a mistake, I pull the trigger.’

Life dependeth on the will of others, death on ours.4

Dostoievsky’s Kirilov said that there are only two reasons why we do not all kill ourselves: pain and the fear of the next world. We seem, more or less, to have got rid of both. In suicide,

perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: you deliberately raise the ante of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities. It is a small-scale model for living but with a difference: unlike your routine

uniqueness. In the circumstances, death may come but it is superfluous.o Without this wild drama of psychosis, there is a kind of

The Freudian analyst, Karl Menninger, has said that there are three components of suicide: the wish to kill, the wish to be killed, the wish to die. Kleinian

‘No one kills himself who has never wanted to kill another, or at least wished the death of another.’ Historically, all

certain point of despair a man will kill himself in order to show he is serious. It

have that last, partial and lop-sided triumph turned, for reasons of decency and bureaucracy, into a malicious accident is to compound failures with final failure.