This morning I finished my latest viewing of the
Cosmos documentary series, and caught a headline in the New York Times:
Andrew Lange, Scholar of the Cosmos, Dies at 52Ah, drat. Drat, drat. When these types of people take their own lives, it's always even more disappointing than usual. It seems like so much more of a waste. Like any human, I play favorites, and intelligent humans are my favorite.
When I was younger, I figured that most folks who committed suicide would do so at a relatively young age, but, as I later learned, this is not necessarily the case. Many people survive and even thrive decades, only to lapse into despair after all that, or to let their guard down and succumb to despair that was always there. I have an ex-friend who I strongly suspect will give in to suicide someday. Friends and family members have tried to do it. And the dean of my College of Engineering, who personally taught my freshmate interest group class, the auspiciously named Dean Denise D. Denton, would go on to the California university system and reach the rank of chancellor only to "successfully" take her own life less than a decade later. So senseless.
I support people's right to take their own life, but it is so senseless. You don't get another one. How sad, then, that even intelligent people like Drs. Lang and Denton, who presumably understand this, would be so consumed by despair to commit themselves willingly to oblivion while still in the thick of life.
It isn't necessarily the wonders of the cosmos that drive a gifted scientist or engineer to destroy themselves, but it surely can contribute. The cosmos seems neither concerned for us nor against us, but only indifferent. It is an intimidating subject of conversation. Be it the shape of the universe or the peril of our own species, there is so much to learn within the treasure chests of knowledge that would shake many kinds of person. The broader perspectives which knowledge can bring, is as dangerous to the untempered mind as a chain fission reaction is to the unshielded body. Why do so many people willingly, as adults, throw their minds into the pit of a religion? Why do so many more simply refuse to ponder anything more remote than the latest text message or their next meal? It is because when we evolved the power to think abstractly, we got more than we bargained for.
An endless universe, expanding forever into a filmy haze of subatomic particles. Dr. Lange helped to prove that this is the future ahead of us. No civilizations, and not even the inviting familiarity of hydrogen atoms to light suns. To a futurist like me, that's not simply dismaying. It's downright frightening. As surely as we are mortal, so too is all of existence doomed to die. As with our own lives, the only comforting part of this foretelling is the incredible time scale involved.
I don't judge anyone who contemplates suicide, nor anyone who actually goes through with it. I call it a waste. I call it a disappointment. But I cannot refute their motives. The mind is a personal place. I myself had a suicidal thought once, lasting for a few hours late one night during the spring break of the end of my senior high school year. I can still remember what it was like, just vaguely, to suddenly want nothing and feel all walls closing in. It was terrible, an emotion so vile that I could neither repulse it nor reconcile it, brought on by my acknowledgment that my childhood dream of ruling the universe and living forever was not going to happen. So, possessed as ever I have been of my dispassionate second self, I figured simply to wait it out. I played endless games of solitaire on the computer. Bill Gates and those silly electronic leaping cards helped me through a tough spot.
So far it is the only time I have ever seriously felt suicidal. Hopefully there will never be another moment like it again in my life. But who really knows what the future holds, when it comes to things like that? I'm better composed than most people. And I seem to have a healthier outlook on life than most people do. That gives me some hope for self.
Ah, but what a loss it is when others don't make it...especially when those others where on the upper end of the spectrum of our human character.
