Ten Favorite Suicide Aphorisms by Hermann Burger
(These are all from Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis: On Killing Oneself, a collection of 1046 such aphorisms recently translated into English by Adrian Nathan West. I admire the book for its absolute commitment to its conceit, which sometimes reads as a forestalling mechanism, sometimes as an inducement.)
333. A patient goes to the doctor with a snakebite and says, quick, give me the serum. But the psychotherapist asks why he wants the serum, why he wants it from her, why at this very moment, and how did he manage to get bitten, and did a serpent ever bite him before. All this is just enough time for the venom to take effect.
417. A truck driver sitting at his regular table where people are telling off-color jokes asks: “You heard this one?” Then he pulls out his pistol and shoots himself.
418. At that, his neighbor stands up, says “I’ve got a better one,” and cuts his own throat with a carving knife. Thus begins a mortological chain of suicides.
876: Paul Valéry writes: “God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.”
903. “The cruelty of death lies in the fact that it brings the real sorrow of the end, but not the end” (fourth octavo notebook). See Kierkegaard. From this we may extract the mortological paradox: “Our salvation is in death, but not this death.”
904. A dreadful scenario for a suicide: you throw yourself in the arms of death, only to think, not this death.
905. Houdini and his appendix: not this death.
906. This is no different from leaping from a tower and thinking as you fall that the spot you are hurtling toward is not where you wanted to land.
907. Or knowing for a fragment of a second as your temple starts to burn: this bullet won’t do.
1027. David Hume writes: “Were the disposal of human life so much revered as the peculiar province of the Almighty that it were an encroachment on his right for men to dispose of their own lives, it would be equally criminal to act for the preservation of life as for its destruction.”
— January 7, 2023