Suicide

Emile Durkheim

“In l738, a journalist (possibly Samuel Richardson) claimed that suicide was England’s 'new religion,'” Freya Johnston remarks a TLS review of three tomes on suicide, Kelly McGuire’s Dying to be English, Paul Seaver et al, editors, The History of Suicide in England, 1650-1850 and Richard Bell’s We Shall Be No More (“Suicide Watch,” TLS, 1/18/13). “Melancholy seemed to infect everyone and everything: even a sedan chair, narrating the history of its life and adventures in London in l757, admits that it has flirted with self destruction: ‘Since my reparation, I have had a very particular dejection of spirits. Whether I am almost tired of a foolish and ridiculous world, I can’t tell…’” Shakespeare reflects the suicidal British temperament. Hamlet was suicidal, Ophelia drowns (and there has always been a debate about whether it was suicide or accident), Othello did it along with both Romeo and Juliet. Of course another English great, Virginia Woolf, would drown herself. Hume, Johnston points out, condoned suicide while “Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) condemns the act in its definition of “SUICIDE:” “Self-murder, the horrid crime of destroying one's self.” Not that the English have any monopoly on suicide, which has been particularly prevalent amongst American poets including Anne Sexton, John Berryman and Sylvia Path. Amongst the Italians Primo Levi survived Auschwitz only to take his life after the war (although there are those who have cast doubts on whether his fall from his Turin residence was suicide or not).  Cesare Pavese, a noted editor and writer, also killed himself. And speaking of melancholy Danes, the Swedes were always known for their high incidence of suicide despite all the entitlements of the welfare state. Albert Camus famously began The Myth of Sisyphus by saying, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”And the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, wrote a book on the subject tersely titled Suicide, in which he attempted to isolate factors such as religious belief, marital status, sex and education, which contributed to suicide. Protestants he concluded were more likely to commit suicide than Catholics or Jews.

Say It Loud

The Sunday Times Book Review has been making some inspired assignments lately. First there was Clinton on the latest volume in Robert Caro’s biography of LBJ ("Seat of Power," NYT, 5/2/12) and this past Sunday the review assigned Al Sharpton to do James Brown (“Say It Loud,” NYT, 6/1/12). Back in the 70’s Don King had an office on the Upper East Side and Sharpton refereed a little scuffle that was going on between King and Brown right on the street in front of the office—the infamous self-promoter briefly sidelining a promoter out of control. Now Sharpton's cast in the role of another kind of referee in offering a judgment on RJ Smith’s The Life and Music of James Brown. If a review can be deemed any indication of the sensibility of the writer, then the one time walking agent provocateur has aged well. “People were often surprised at his relevance, but James never doubted his own significance, or the fact that he was a historic figure and an undeniably game-changing artist,” Sharpton opines. A few sentences later, he remarks, “James didn’t bring blacks to the mainstream; instead, he brought the mainstream to blacks and made them appreciate and internalize black music and culture themselves.” Those who might not always cotton to Sharpton’s tendentiousness in politics will certainly appreciate his literate punditry. Perhaps Sharpton’s true calling lies in book reviewing! Newsweek once did a survey about how Americans rated varying professions. Criticism was right at the bottom of the list, along with garbage pickup, but Sharpton has pizzazz and charm and rolls off words like a latter day Samuel Johnson. Sharpton’s review of the James Brown bio was a breath of fresh air. Those who follow the workings of TNYTBR will wait with baited breath to see what Sam Tanenhaus comes up with next.

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Wordmonger

Words have personalities. There’s prolepsis, a condition of answering an as yet unasked question, and morganatic, which refers to the untitled bastards of nobility. Inspissation is a thermodynamic word referring to the behavior of high density liquids in narrow spaces.

There’s the neurological term perseveration, which refers to irrational graphic repetitions; limpid, which doesn’t mean what it sounds like; labile, which has nothing to do with the vagina; and the two vens, venial and venal, which have practically opposite applications despite the similarity in sound and appearance.

Then there are the technical words for mental states, like anagnosia, and states of language and meaning such as aporia, which refers to the presence of two equal and opposing views. Now, an aporia is not an oxymoron, since it doesn’t refer to nouns. How to get out of this quagmire, this syzygy, in which the sun moon and earth are aligned, without the help of a quisling, a person who takes after the Norwegian diplomat who was discovered playing both sides against the middle?

Samuel Johnson devoted his life to words, and Boswell devoted his life to the randy, carousing Johnson, but all their words have outlived them. Words are organic in that they are growing, changing, adapting like the multiple cells that populate organs. But unlike organic matter, words never really die. They are transformed by time, but they never seem to falter, even in the case of languages like Yiddish, which experience a life after death. Words can be extant and extinct at the same time. Has the Yiddish oy become a form of preverbal expression, or was the preverbal expression turned into a word? And then there are words and expressions that travel freely between languages, as if they were given some kind of diplomatic passport. Concierge is one of those words that have free passage between England and France.

Words are like clay. They can be molded into wonderful monuments to emotion, or, in the hands of jargonistas, can be turned into the KFC of expression. Narcissism and self-involvement are two words that have summarily been denuded of meaning through indiscriminate, unprofessional use. The city agency that hands out summons for noise should also ticket people who emasculate words like narcissism through after-hours use.

And then there’s feckless. That’s a simple word that hasn’t gotten its due. Feckless has a long way to go before it reaches the breaking point, as is the case with apoptosis, another one of those technical words, albeit one with some degree of poetic significance, to the extent that it refers to cell death.

Logorrhea is diarrhea of the mouth, but it is also a nice word in that it uses its Greek roots to pinpoint a condition that does to words what spendthrift does to money, which is to exhaust resources for the sake of dubious and ephemeral gains. Is this post an example of persiflage?