albert camus the myth of sisyphus and other essays

Martin may be, as he claims, addicted to suicidal ideation, but he is also aware of the incongruities of this addiction. I cite that passage because, among other things, it’s funny-intentionally so. Self-extinguish? Now you’ve got my attention.” Precisely what I was hoping to prevent when I thought about my own death was worse pain. It’s mental suffering that I wasn’t able to avoid-as indeed none of us can-and that was what motivated my suicide attempts. Alvarez’s 1972 inquiry, The Savage God.) “All my life,” Martin notes, “I’ve feared and avoided physical suffering. It is also a blunt and bracing read that people who have had experience with suicide may find challenging. The result is a work that feels sui generis. In How Not to Kill Yourself, he seeks to understand suicide as both philosophy and impulse, interweaving personal history, his own deep reading in the literature of self-annihilation, and the ethical and metaphysical concerns that immersion inspires. Like Camus, Martin is a philosopher and a fiction writer he teaches at the University of Missouri at Kansas City and is perhaps best known for his 2009 novel, How to Sell. “The last time I tried to kill myself,” he confesses, “was in my basement with a dog leash.” Compare that with Clancy Martin, whose new book, How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind, starts with a blunt account of the most recent of the author’s many suicide attempts. Of course, there is no indication that Camus ever considered taking his own life his essay represents an extended thought experiment, addressing the conundrum of how to exist meaningfully in an absurd universe. Let’s stop playing, Camus seems to be insisting, and get real about what matters.

“T here is but one truly serious philosophical problem,” Albert Camus begins his 1942 essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” “and that is suicide.” It’s a statement to which I’ve long found myself attracted, for both its philosophical rigor (deciding to live, after all, is the ultimate existentialist commitment) and its willful posture of provocation. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text 741741 for the Crisis Text Line. If you are in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone.

Albert camus the myth of sisyphus and other essays