Subject: sentence of death
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Wed Mar 01 2000 - 03:38:10 EST
We seem mostly agreed that any act is the outcome
of the interplay of several different causes - each one
with its own weight.
But I'm sufficiently old fashioned - or, as some prefer,
corrupted by my work - to be especially interested
in the unrecognised (or only dimly recognised),
warring elements inside each of us that can produce
behaviour bewildering even - or particularly -
to ourselves.
My beloved Graham Greene claims to have played
Russian roulette - the real thing - as a boy with
his father's revolver on Berkhampstead Common
in an attempt to allay his 'boredom', which I'm sure
was an early expression of the depression that plagued
him all his life.
Suicide features in quite a few of his books. But the first
one to be half successful, & which no one reads now,
was called The Man Within. He took the title from
a 17th Century poem (by ?) with the lines:
'But there's a man within me
And he's angry with me.'
Many violent suicides, the hangings & the shootings,
seem to have the quality of self-executions. The man
within has passed sentence of death on someone who
does not deserve to live. Most of us at one time or another
have known sufficient despair to see death as preferable
to this life. I suspect the need to adminster the extreme
punishment is rarer & less conscious. And anyway, by the time
the felon kicks away the stool or fires the gun he has,
in my view, crossed over into madness. Yet the self-hatred
may be there - in nascent form - in more of us than can
bring ourselves to face it.
Could it have been there in Seymour?
Scottie B.
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat Apr 01 2000 - 10:11:38 EST