Suicide As A Strategy For Escape

“Should we regard suicide — under the right circumstances — as the logical end of the Good Life? The question is raised by the death of the distinguished British conductor Sir Edward Downes, 85, and his wife Joan, 74,” whose children framed their deaths “as the culmination of the couple’s fruitful years together.” Michael Chabon, considering David Foster Wallace’s suicide, says that while “suicide is an idea alien to my way of thinking … [t]he world, like our heads, was meant to be escaped from.”