A Farewell, Precise & Planned

By Sarath de Alwis –JUNE 15, 2020

Sarath de Alwis

In his novel ‘The Plague’ existentialist philosopher novelist Albert Camus writes about a virus that destroys half the population of the very ordinary money centric town of Oran in French Algeria. 

During the two-months of a total lock down I fetched my ancient copy of the novel and read it and reread it. In several essays I wrote during the lockdown I referred to some of his trenchant observations. It is considered one of the finest pieces of post-world war French Literature. 

Camus ponders on our very human psychological response to the plague. “At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they’re returning.”

Just when the lockdown eased, I learnt of the suicide of a person whom I had known for the past forty years. Suicide is the ultimate retreat from life.  

How strange I thought. For sixty odd days, I was contemplating on the meaning and purpose of life. And here was a person who had patiently waited for the lockdown to ease so that he could make his retreat on his own terms. 

The philosopher Camus believed that the ‘Absurd’ arose out of the conflict between our search for meaning and the random nature and the utter meaninglessness of the universe. 

A lifeless body discovered on the manicured lawn of independence square  testified to our painful proximity to mortality and our struggle to maintain self-esteem in a constant state of existential angst.  

The lockdown that turned our lives upside down was all about the idea of overcoming death. Defeating death has been the quest of mankind since the discovery of ignorance and the beginning of science.  Despite the scourge of the pandemic medical science is in a relentless march to make life more secure.

As the futurist Yuval Harari observes the 21st century human agenda considers death, decease and old age to be technical problems that science could and should overcome.  

Two genetic engineers, who have recently published ‘The Death of Death’, claim that by year 2045 human beings will only die in accidents and not due to natural causes or illness. A Spanish scientist Jose Luis Cordeiro and Cambridge (UK) mathematician David Wood assert that immortality is a real scientific possibility and it is time to consider old age as an illness that calls for a cure! 

If overcoming death is a primal human instinct, why do people commit suicide?  Sheer senselessness of this act of despair compel us to ponder this question. 

Did the pressures of the present and fears of the future precipitate this agonized cry of enough is enough? 

The dismissively smartass expression is that Suicide is a permeant solution to a temporary problem. It ignores the profoundly tortured world of the person who has finally succeeded in leaving behind something deep and lasting. 

A person’s suicide often takes the people it leaves behind by surprise. If you knew the person well enough and close enough, and you still possess normal human emotions, you are bound to experience some faint traces of a survivor’s guilt for failing to see it coming.

Some unknown, ghoul who had access to the very personal note left behind by the person has released its contents. Any reference to the contents in that communication would be ethically reprehensible.

Assuming that suicide is a fleeting impulsive aberration, or an avoidable side effect of a mental disorder ignores reality. 

It is a reality check in the murky world of vulgar wealth. It is a protest addressed to the affluent class that has avoided the painful task of being human. Of the failure to behave as normal beings who are willing to share and reach out.   

The subject of Suicide, the point of departure of this essay, prodded my memory about another provocatively original collection of essays Camus published as ‘The myth of Sisyphus’ – drawing on the moral fable about Sisyphus – the Homeric character in Greek mythology. 

Sisyphus outwitted the gods. For that impudence he was condemned for all eternity to push a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll to the bottom again and again. Sisyphus fully recognizes the futility and pointlessness of his task. But he willingly pushes the boulder up the mountain every time it rolls down, for he was taking on the gods!   

In his first essay “An Absurd Reasoning” Camus opens with these extreme lines. 

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