(4 of 6)
Still, many who kill themselves have an understandable desire for extinction—Shneidman and Farberow call them "surcease" suicides. Brilliant, hard-driving lames Forrestal, the first U.S. Defense Secretary, who threw himself from a 16th-story hospital window in May of 1949, was suffering from a mental breakdown and decided that life was unendurable with his mind impaired. Novelist Virginia Woolf also killed herself (in April 1941) because she thought she was going mad. Poet Hart Crane was seriously deranged when he killed himself in April 1932, as was Ernest Hemingway when he blew his brains out with his favorite shotgun. Hemingway's suicide raises the problem of whether the tendency can be inherited (his father shot himself when the author was 29, and his sister died, apparently of an overdose of drugs, last month). Studies of identical twins indicate that there is no genetic factor, but suicide does run in some families—perhaps because of the suggestibility that occasionally produces epidemics of suicide, such as that in 18th century Germany in imitation of Goethe's sick but romantic hero, Werther. Marilyn Monroe felt that she had good cause to hate the world, and may well have unconsciously fantasied many suicides do—that in killing herself she was destroying it, as in A. E. Housman's poem:
Good creatures, do you love your lives
And have you ears for sense?
Here is a knife like other knives,
That cost me eighteen pence.
Vneed but stick it in my heart
And down will come the sky,
And earth's foundations will depart
And all you folk will die.
How to Get Through a Bad Night
Serious study of suicide has been hampered by the fear and loathing that society brings to the idea of self-destruction; an example is Mary Hemingway's initial insistence that her husband's death was accidental. Primitive tribes usually fear the suicide as a ghostly avenger. Pre-Christian Greeks tended to disapprove of it as an offense against the gods, whose property men were. But the Stoics and Epicureans, taking man as the measure of all things, condoned self-destruction as a blessed escape. Said Seneca: "Against all the injuries of life, I have the refuge of death." As Nietzsche was later to remark more pithily: "The thought of suicide gets one successfully through many a bad night."
There are seven suicides in the Bible, from Samson to Judas, and neither the Old Testament nor the New specifically forbids it, as does the Koran, which calls suicide "a much graver crime than homicide." But St. Augustine condemned it as "a detestable and damnable wickedness," perhaps to put a stop to a growing tendency of extremist Christians to seek instant sainthood via self-martyrdom. From the Middle Ages to the end of the 18th century in Europe, self-murder was stigmatized by the full force of church and state—a suicide's property was confiscated, his body was dragged through the streets and buried at a crossroads, with a stake driven through the heart (presumably to keep him from haunting the living). In Asia, by contrast, suicide as a form of renunciation has widely been considered admirable.