“There may be however one really severe philosophical downside, and that’s suicide,” Albert Camus wrote in one of the crucial provocative opening sentences in all of literature, unspooling into one of the most daring works of philosophy. “Judging whether or not life is or just isn’t price residing quantities to answering the elemental query of philosophy. All the remainder — whether or not or not the world has three dimensions, whether or not the thoughts has 9 or twelve classes — comes afterwards.”
Camus was each very proper and really incorrect, the best way solely an incredible thoughts may be, as a result of the basics of philosophy come after, not earlier than, the basics of physics.
By the point we are able to even start answering for ourselves the query of whether or not or not is price residing, myriad issues have been answered for us by the elemental forces which have conspired into the confluence of likelihood that’s our self. None of us select the our bodies or brains or neurochemistries we’re born with, the time and place we’re deposited into, the mother and father we’re raised by, the tradition we’re cultured in. Any sense of selection we would have is already saturated with these likelihood inheritances and is subsequently, as James Baldwin so astutely observed, half phantasm and half vainness.
And but dwell we should, with the playing cards we have now been dealt, each day answering Camus’s query with our pre-answered fundaments of chaos and likelihood.
On these days after we are so life-weary, so defeated by the chance-circumstance of our scenario, so tempted to reply within the damaging, the smallest gesture of kindness may be nothing lower than a lifeline. That’s what Gwendolyn Brooks (June 7, 1917–December 3, 2000) realized over breakfast at a lodge sooner or later in her late sixties, when the younger waiter met her easy brilliant “Good morning!” with a pant on the verge of tears: “Oh, thanks, thanks!”
She puzzled what he have to be residing by, in that case early in life and so early within the day he was already so heavy with despair, so grateful for the salvation of a easy smile from a stranger. (One such smile had saved Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s life half a century earlier.)
Out of that compassionate wonderment got here Brooks’s lifeline of a poem “To the Younger Who Wish to Die,” which appeared in her 1987 assortment The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (public library), devoted to the scholars of the Gwendolyn Brooks Junior Excessive Faculty, printed by the imprint she had based and named after her father, the janitor of a music firm.
On the 2022 Universe in Verse, themed What Is Life?, Roxane Homosexual introduced the poem to life, prefaced with a poignant private reflection on the poem within the context of the devastating loss of her brother:
TO THE YOUNG WHO WANT TO DIE
by Gwendolyn BrooksSit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall within the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait per week: will wait by April.
You don’t have to die this sure day.
Loss of life will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I guarantee you demise will wait. Loss of life has
loads of time. Loss of life can
attend to you tomorrow. Or subsequent week. Loss of life is
simply down the road; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any second.You needn’t die at present.
Keep right here — by pout or ache or peskyness.
Keep right here. See what the information goes to be tomorrow.Graves develop no inexperienced that you should utilize.
Keep in mind, inexperienced’s your coloration. You might be Spring.
Complement with Galway Kinnell’s kindred poem “Wait,” composed to maintain a younger buddy from taking his personal life, then revisit Gwendolyn Brooks on the vivifying power of books and Audre Lorde, in an exquisite anthology edited by Roxane Homosexual, on poetry as an instrument of change and courage.
