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Anybody interested in reading a bunch of quotations from Edouard Leve's novella "Suicide Note"?
The author submitted it to his publishers in 2007 at the age of 42 before committing suicide ten days later.
If this thread interests you please bump to keep it alive.
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BUMPing BECAUSE I'M VERY INTERESTED
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>>36491793
just fucking post them you mong
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OP here. The book is written in second-person and is addressed to a fictional friend who committed suicide at the age of 25.
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On suicide and silence
>"Since you seldom spoke, you were rarely wrong. You seldom spoke because you seldom went out. If you did go out, you listened and watched. Now, since you no longer speak, you will always be right. In truth, you do still speak: through those, like me, who bring you back to life and interrogate you. We hear your responses and admire their wisdom. If the facts turn out to contradict your counsel, we blame ourselves for having misinterpreted you. Yours are the truths, ours are the errors."
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On the suicide's life as a form of ruin
>"A ruin is an accidental aesthetic object. If it becomes beautiful, this was certainly not the intention. A ruin is not constructed or maintained. The tendency of a ruin is to crumble down into a heap. The most beautiful parts remain standing despite their wear and tear. The memory of you is what stays up, your body what subsides."
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On the suicide's life as a hypothesis
>"Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and will remain, made up of possibilities."
__________
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Never heard of him so I googled him
>"His final book, Suicide, although fictional, evokes the suicide of his childhood friend 20 years earlier,"
>tfw my childhood friend killed himself earlier this year and I'm planning on ending mine after being an ecrivain manque
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On suffering and youth
>"You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because then you would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded."
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On suicide and the fear of death
>"Your suicide was not preceded by failed attempts. You did not fear death. You stepped in its path, but without really desiring it: how can one desire something one doesn't know? You didn't deny life but affirmed your taste for the unknown betting that if something existed on the other side, it would be better than here."
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On travelling and staying home
>"You didn't like to travel. You rarely went abroad. You would spend your time in your bedroom. It seemed useless to you to travel for miles in order to stay in a place less comfortable than your own. To think up imaginary holidays was enough for you. [...] When you were sick of your bedroom, you consoled yourself by rereading your notes on these imaginary holidays, and you closed your eyes to visualize them."
__________
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>>36492046
>tfw I can relate to these
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On silently observing others
>"In public, your quiet way of observing others made them uncomfortable, as if you were a breathing statue, indifferent to all the frivolous movement that the stillness of a statue so underlines."
__________
On suicide as a negative beauty
>"In art, to reduce is to perfect. Your disappearance bestowed a negative beauty on you."
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On the form of suicide
>"You did not hesitate. You prepared the shotgun. You put in a shell. You fired into your mouth. You knew that suicide by shotgun could fail when aiming for the temple, the forehead, or the heart, because the recoil throws the gun off its target. With the mouth keeping it steady, errors are rare. [...] Yours was violent, the result irreversible. [...] Your gaze was no longer fixed on the world around you, but sighted on your target. [...] Your suicide was an action, but an action with a contrary effect: a form of vitality that produces its own death."
__________
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>>36492160
please keep them coming OP...
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On daylight and other people
>"The violence of daylight would efface the nocturnal clarity. [...] In the daytime, people were barriers, dividing you up, preventing you from hearing what you listened to at night: the voice of your brain."
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On treatment for depression
>"You didn't see a psychoanalyst, but you spent a lot of time analyzing yourself. [...] You reflected on psychoanalysis, but you didn't practice it. You thought that treatment would normalize you, or banalize the strangeness you cultivated. You used to like listening to others. They trusted you. Quiet, attentive, and constructive, you helped those who placed their confidence in your more than you helped yourself."
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On doing little
>"You refused to be prolific. You would do little, but well, or do nothing rather than do it poorly. You knew nothing of contemporary appetites. [...] You liked to forego eating, drinking, smoking, speaking, going out. You were able to dispense with light for days on end, happy in your room with the curtains drawn. You didn't miss fresh air. You were thrilled by silence. You made a classicism out of this drought."
__________
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>>36491793
should I buy this book? what are the chances I'm gonna end up dead a few days after I read it?
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OP here. The book is actually called "Suicide". I confused it with Mitchell Heisman's "Suicide Note".
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On doubt
>"You used to give yourself over to endless sessions of doubt. You would claim to be an expert on the subject. But doubting would tire you so much that you would end up doubting doubt itself. I saw you one day at the end of an afternoon of solitary speculation. You were unmoving and petrified. Running several kilometers iin a deep forest full of ravines and pitfalls would have exhausted you less."
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On the sincerity of the priest at the funeral
>"He gave your eulogy. He said nothing true, nothing false. In his mouth, you could have been anyone. Even though he had prepared his sermon without knowing you, he appeared to be moved while delivering it, as if he was speaking of someone dear to him. I did not doubt his sincerity, though I did believe him to be moved by death itself than by yours in particular."
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On violence and gentleness
>"you noted that in your there was a mixture of the violence of the one and the gentleness of the other. Your father exerted his violence on others. Your mother was sympathetic to the suffering of others. One day you directed the violence you had inherited towards yourself. You dished it out like your father and you took it like your mother."
__________
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These excerpts are top notch, I'm interested
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On suicide and biography
>"The way in which you quit it rewrote the story of your life in a negative form. Those who knew you reread each of your acts in the light of your last. [...] Isn't it peculiar how this final gesture inverts your biography? I've never heard a single person, since your death, tell your life's story starting at the beginning. Your suicide has become the foundational act [...]"
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On the past, present and future
>"your preceeding stops would become more attractive as you got further away from them. For you, the past would be forever improving, the future would draw you forward, but the present would weigh you down."
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On living as a spectator
>"You were a spectator and not an actor: mobile voyeur, silent listener, accidental tourist. At random, you would visit public spaces, squares, streets, and parks. [...] You liked public places where no one was surprised if you stood still in the middle of the urban flux."
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On detachment and cruelty
>"a few seconds looking at passersby would be enough for you to label them with a few incisive words. You would create an entire cruel category out of a person or detail. Fifty-year-old virgin, very tall dwarf, ogre in a smock, ring-wing swinger [...] pedophile accountant, hetero fag; [...] You were neither malicious nor cynical, just pitiless."
__________
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>>36492744
This is a great thread to leave on my screen, along with my unanswered messages to "friends" who lied about including me into their activities, for when I kill my ugly retarded self. Thanks, OP!
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On being ill-adapted to the world
>"You were not surprised to feel yourself ill adapted to the world, but it did surprise you that the world had produced a being who now lived in it as a foreigner. Do plants commit suicide? Do animals die of hopelessness? They either function or disappear. You were perhaps a weak link, an accidental evolutionary dead end a temporary anomaly not destined to burgeon again."
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On failing to convey your mental state
>"You were surprised that your state of mind could be so variable without those around you noticing. Once you confessed to someone that you had been very depressed when dining with her several months earlier. She was stunned, discovering her blindness like a time bomb. And you, faithful, kept a straight face."
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On violence
>"You directed toward yourself a violence that you did not feel toward others. For them you reserved all your patience and tolerance."
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>>36492954
Hey anon, I was suicidal about the same thing this January.
Wanna talk?
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Anyone have a pdf or anything of this book? Can't find one online uwu
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>>36493557
OP here. I found it difficult to find an English translation of the book. I had to contact the publishers (Dalkey Archive) directly and buy a copy they had lying around.
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On hesitating to make new friends
>"You refused to be the odd one out. Even if this group welcomed you, you would remain the latecomer. [...] You preferred not approaching the circle to having to remain at its edge."
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On climate and preference
>"Sun, heat, and light, which delighted those around you, appeared to you as perturbations of your solitude, summons to the outdoors, obligations to joy. You refused to have your euphoria put down to climate. You wanted to be solely responsible for it. If you were asked to do something on account of the good weather, you declined the invitation. Gray weather, winter, rain, or cold did not displease you. Nature then seemed to be in tune with your mood. If the weather was poor, you would be let off the book, no one would think of reproaching you for not going out. You could stay at your place without the anomalous appearance of your shutting yourself in."
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On the homeless
>"homeless people were like ghosts foretelling one of your possible end. You didn't identify with happy people, and in your excessiveness you projected onto those who had failed in everything, or succeeded in nothing. The homeless embodied the final stage in a decline your life could have tended toward. [...] This was what disturbed you the most: that you could, one day, choose to fall. Not let yourself go, which would only have been a form of passivity. but to want to descend, to degrade yourself, to become a ruin of yourself."
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>>36493690
not that anon but where could I get the original book? I can read French. Do you have any idea where I could find it in pdf?
Also, thank you for this very good thread OP, we're blessed.
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>>36493900
OP here. It's available in French from amazon or abebooks. I doubt a pdf / kindle version is available unfortunately.
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On antidepressants
>"You wondered whether your malaise could be attributed to a physical malfunction. You made an appointment with a general practitioner who prescribed you antidepressants. You took them as an experiment. After a few days, you experienced a feeling of strangeness. You heard words leave your mouth as if they belonged to someone else. [...] You next picked up a book and started reading. The words on the page sketched out the lines of an abstract painting; their meaning escaped you. [...] Nothing kept your attention. [...] Agitation led you without logic from one action to another, so that you accomplished none. [...] You went back to the doctor's office, he prescribed you a new antidepressant, which also acted as a sleeping pill. Taking it, you immediately found yourself in a deep sleep, but unfortunately you never really woke from it."
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On trying to stay alive
>"You knew that some of those close to you would feel guilty at not having anticipated your choice to die, and that they would deplore their inability to help you to want to live. But you thought them mistaken. No one other than yourself could have given you a greater taste for life than for death. You imagined scenes in which someone tried to cheer you up, as a mother might take her melancholy child by the hand and show it things she believes will make it happy. The repulsion that then took hold of you did not come from your rejection of this well-meaning woman, nor from the nature of the supposed objects of joy that she would show you, but from the fact that the desire to live could not be dictated to you."
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