"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.

[ithinkmyliverhurts]

Judging whether or not life is worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy." Albert Camus, _The Myth of Sisyphus_.

Perhaps I'm waxing nostalgic, but, for the love of God, health care is about more than politics, $$$, or life and death. It's about living. The world is beautiful, tragic, yes, of course, but beautiful nonetheless. Let us live life to the fullest, carpe diem ("pluck the day," for all of you Latin nerds out there), "enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life which has been given to you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 9.9). Let us live another day in this wonderfully miserable world, inhabited by absurd, wonderfully miserable people. All is vanity. Drink wine, love one another, and give the people who need it health care so that they can live their wonderfully vain lives to old age.

Oh, yes, life and love, vanity of vanities.

[villager]

1. Are you quoting Walker Percy?

he said something similar in "Lost in the Cosmos," for example...

[ithinkmyliverhurts]

3. Albert Camus. I'll edit to include the source. Ooops.

[villager]

4. Oh, right. It was Camus.

But being a Percy fan, I was reminded of him first. Presumably, that may be where he got it from.

On edit: Suicide evidently ran in Percy's family, for a couple generations prior to him...

[Tangerine LaBamba]

9. Walker readily admitted his thievery -

once, I asked him about a reference he'd made, and he breezily told me that he got it from Arthur Koestler, who, Walker believed, had stolen it from someone else........................

[villager]

12. You asked him!!? Wow! What was he like in person...!?

n/t

[Tangerine LaBamba]

15. We were great friends -

If you get me started about him, I'll go on forever. I loved that man.

In person, he was tall, slender, very graceful, soft-spoken. He was like a ghost, a shade, sometimes; he could just sort of disappear in a group. Which he liked.

He was very, very, very smart. Brilliant, but he'd shudder if he knew I was using that word to describe him. He was trained as a physician, you probably know that, wanted to be a pathologist, but contracted TB during his residency (or internship - I'm not sure), and ended up in a sanitarium for a year or so, where he wrote "The Moviegoer."

He was a Catholic convert, and like all converts, was very devout, a great believer. I, who had been brought up as a Roman Catholic, a much younger, Northern woman, was as different from Walker, the quintessential Southern gentleman, as anyone could be. We met through mutual friends, Obie Hardison and his wife, when Obie was the head of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, and Walker came to town to speak there. The Hardisons invited me to a cocktail party in Walker's honor.

What they didn't know was that I'd written a letter to Walker Percy a few years earlier, when I'd read a book of his at a very difficult time in my life, and Walker had written back (that letter is framed and matted, hanging right here, in this study, over my desk), and that had begun a correspondence that we'd both hugely enjoyed. That we were going to meet in person was just a great delight for both of us.

We had about seven years of friendship before cancer took him away. We talked a lot, in person and on the phone, and we never ran out of things to talk about. Suicide played a large role in both our lives, so we had what we used to call "our secret language," and, I think it's in "The Thanataos Syndrome," if you ever encounter Walker's fabulous exposition on "non-suicides versus ex-suicides," that's an almost-verbatim transcription of a conversation we had one hot summer morning in his kitchen in his home in Covington, LA.

He was a prince of a man, a rare gift, a man who took it all in, a man who lacked the protection that skin gives normal people. He had to protect himself from the world sometimes, because he lacked that filter that preserves most people from the backstories of people he encountered. He took it all in, as I said, and it touched him everywhere.

I miss him. Thank you for giving me a chance to talk about my beloved old friend........

[villager]

18. Thanks for this!

Thanks much...!

I'm gonna PM you... ! :hi:

[Tangerine LaBamba]

7. Yes, he did -

he was my friend. Parts of that book are directly from conversations he and I had - mostly about suicide, which we both knew far too intimately.

Good on you for spotting that. Walker would be so pleased to know he's still remembered...........................

[TexasObserver]

2. Every person owns their own life.

That includes the right to end it.

[northzax]

5. While the technical translation

Of 'carpe diem' is 'pluck the day' the contextual clues from Horace obviously lead to the translation of 'seize the day'. Just sayin'

And yes, everyone owns their own body, but there are few circumstances beyond terminal disease in which suicide is an ethical choice.

[ithinkmyliverhurts]

6. "obviously lead to the translation of 'seize the day'."

No, it doesn't, especially in light of Horace's oeuvre.

"Tu ne quaesieris—scire nefas—quem mihi, quem tibi
finem di dederint, Leuconoë, nec Babylonios
temptaris numeros. ut melius, quicquid erit, pati!
seu plures hiemes, seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,
quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare
Tyrhenum. Sapias, vina liques, et spatio brevi
spem longam reseces. dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero."

Good god, he's using "pruning" and wine as a metaphor.

[tabasco]

8. Whose ethics?

[Tangerine LaBamba]

10. That is your judgment,

and it is, perhaps, quite adequate for you, but the idea to end one's life is purely subjective, and we are not, not any of us, equipped to decide whether exercising that choice is "ethical" or not.

Walking in another's moccasins might give you a very different, more generous perspective.....................

[ithinkmyliverhurts]

11. Actually, Camus' point was that suicide while it was an option

wasn't really an option. He was the last of the great humanists.

I don't follow this: "Walking in another's moccasins might give you a very different, more generous perspective....................."

It seems a bit of a non-sequitor. Maybe you're just aching to hammer me?

[Tangerine LaBamba]

13. Hammer you?

If I had wanted to hammer you - as I told you I did - I would have. You really must stop making unfounded assumptions. You made such a great recovery from your first big mistake in this thread - don't blow it. You did good.

No, I just have a broader view of how suicide might be perceived. It's a hot topic, on which everyone has an opinion, and I'm sure your view, or Camus', might not match up with mine.

The moccasin line was hardly a non sequitur - it followed exactly, and watch your spelling.

I like to think of myself as a humanist, too, and in my definition of that, it includes leaving all freedom of choice to people where their own lives are concerned. My definition...........................

[ithinkmyliverhurts]

14. Perhaps you can connect some dots for me.

I'm not seeing the connection between your response here and my OP. Perhaps you would be kind enough to show me exactly how you were responding to me because I'm just not getting it. Perhaps moccasins are the key to it all. I must be misreading either my OP (which is possible) or your response (which is probable).

My post wasn't really about suicide, but about life itself. It was a rejection of the terms of the debate that health care seems to be going in (death panels, euthanasia, etc.).

Oh, boy, we've now devolved into spelling complaints. Ellipsis should only take 3 periods :-)

[Tangerine LaBamba]

16. You're confused because,

if you look, you'll see that I was not responding to your OP..................

[ithinkmyliverhurts]

17. Are you sure you weren't responding to nothzax

because he's the one who brought up the ethical dimension. I imagine I've got a slightly different definition of what "ethical" means than most (it's probably a moccasin thing).

[Tangerine LaBamba]

19. You can't tell how threads work?

You can't follow the lines - a hint: they're vertical - that go between a post and a response?

Good luck................

[ithinkmyliverhurts]

20. Well, then, we're back to square one,

and you're just going to have to explain your koan-like gibberish.

I'm thick-headed like that, I s'pose.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

21. Let me try this one more time -

I'm enormously good-natured, and this is now amusing.

The post you thought was addressed to you, the one with the "moccasin" reference, was not addressed to you.

It was addressed to another DUer.

Not to you.

You're not thick-headed. It seems like you just might be a little lonely, looking for connection, trying to make your thoughts known.

It's all right. As I said, I'm good-natured.

So, now that the source of your confusion is cleared up, I wish you a good night............................

[ithinkmyliverhurts]

22. Thank you.

Happy I could amuse you.

And, yes, I'm very lonely. Thanks for cheering me up and keeping me company.

[aikoaiko]

23. ahhh, I remember discussing Camus in hs english.

we all decided that suicide was the only rational decision, but we don't do ot and that was the cause of the human condition.

I lived life with more gusto after that realization.

[bemildred]

24. That and "The Rebel".

I read them 40 years ago, and I still go back to them.

[bemildred]

26. "In the difficult times we face, what more can I hope for than the power

to exclude nothing, and to learn how to weave from strands of black and white one rope stretched to the breaking point."

[grantcart]

25. This turned out to be kind of a funny thread - but your OP was very sensitive and sound

There may have been another forum where this thread could be kicked back and forth for a couple of weeks.