Next up on the essays shelf:
A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing
A mortician friend of Mencken’s tells him that the number of suicides are up. To the mortician, this is good news. More business for him. This is the opening of Mencken’s essay on suicide, a typically cynical way in. It is the launching-pad for Mencken’s contemplations on the taboo subject, which (naturally) he goes after fearlessly and obnoxiously. He barely gives lip service to “suicide is horrible”. In fact, he thinks it’s rather logical. Life sucks. Basically. The men (and women, although you assume Mencken is thinking of men) who decide to take their own lives have looked around and assessed the situation logically and properly. And Christians, in Mencken’s mind, have no business condemning such people since it’s the Christians who see the world as a vale of tears, full of sin and degradation, and the only thing worth hoping for is the afterlife. So shut it, Christians!
Mencken then goes into a contemplation as to why people choose to take their own lives. He wonders about it. He puts forth some theories. He rejects them. He tries other theories. He is thinking aloud, but because he is Mencken, it is literate and compelling.
Trigger warning, I suppose, for those who find suicide to be a trigger-y subject.
And I think he’s on to something when he talks about the escapism of work and play. I just wrote a review of “The Motel Life” (will be up today) which deals with escapism, and how escapism is often our most intelligent characteristic. Louis Ck kind of slam-dunked this with his smart phone rant, and our desire to stave off the sadness that underlies everything.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot these days, especially with the mental health treatment plan/whatchamacallit I’m in. And I know a thing or two about suicide. So Mencken’s words resonate here. They are not cuddly or warm, but they have truth in them.
This piece was first printed in the Baltimore Sun in August, 1926. Here’s an excerpt.
A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing
I pass over the theological objections to self-destruction as too sophistical to be worth a serious answer. From the earliest days Christianity has depicted life on this earth as so sad and vain that its value is indistinguishable from that of a damn. Then why cling to it? Simply because its vanity and unpleasantness are parts of the will of a Creator whose love for His creatures takes the form of torturing them. If they revolt in this world they will be tortured a million times worse in the next. I present the argument as a typical specimen of theological reasoning, and proceed to more engaging themes. Specifically, to my original thesis: that it is difficult, if not impossible, to discover any evidential or logical reason, not instantly observed to be full of fallacy, for keeping alive. The universal wisdom of the world long ago concluded that life is mainly a curse. Turn to the proverbial philosophy of any race, and you will find it full of a sense of the futility of the mundane struggle. Anticipation is better than realization. Disappointment is the lot of man. We are born in pain and die in sorrow. The lucky man died a’ Wednesday. He giveth His beloved sleep. I could run like that to pages. If you disdain folk-wisdom, secular or sacred, then turn to the works of William Shakespeare. They drip with such pessimism from end to end. If there is any general idea in them, it is the idea that human existence is a painful futility. Out, out, brief candle!
Yet we cling to it in a muddled physiological sort of way – or, perhaps more accurately, in a pathological way – and even try to fill it with a gaudy hocus-pocus. All men who, in any true sense, are sentient strive mightily for distinction and power, i.e., for the respect and envy of their fellowmen, i.e., for the ill-natured admiration of an endless series of miserable and ridiculous bags of rapidly disintegrating amino acids. Why? If I knew, I’d certainly not be writing books in this infernal American climate; I’d be sitting in state in a hall of crystal and gold, and people would be paying $10 a head to gape at me through peep-holes. But though the central mystery remains, it is possible, perhaps, to investigate the superficial symptoms to some profit. I offer myself as a laboratory animal. Why have I worked so hard for years and years, desperately striving to accomplish something that remains impenetrable to me to this day? Is it because I desire money? Bosh! I can’t recall ever desiring it for an instant: I have always found it easy to get all I wanted. Is it, then, notoriety that I was after? Again the answer must be no. The attention of strangers is unpleasant to me, and I avoid it as much as possible. Then is it a yearning to Do Good that moves me? Bosh and blah! If I am convinced of anything, it is that Doing Good is in bad taste.
Once I ventured the guess that men worked in response to a vague inner urge for self-expression. But that was probably a shaky theory, for some men who work the hardest have nothing to express. A hypothesis with rather more plausibility in it now suggests itself. It is that men work simply in order to escape the depressing agony of contemplating life – that their work, like their play, is a mumbo-jumbo that serves them by permitting them to escape from reality. Both work and play, ordinarily, are illusions.Neither serves any solid or permanent purpose. But life, stripped of such illusions, instantly becomes unbearable. Man cannot sit still, contemplating his destiny in this world, without going frantic. So he invents ways to take his mind off the horror. He works. He plays. He accumulates the preposterous nothing called property. He strives for the coy eyewink called fame. He founds a family, and spends his curse over others. All the while the thing that moves him is simply the yearning to lose himself, to forget himself, to escape the tragic-comedy that is himself. Life, fundamentally, is not worth living. So he confects artificialities to make it so. So he erects a gaudy structure to conceal the fact that it is not so.
