Mouse-in-hand, I’m daily reminded of the abundant mental and physical weakness on display in this world, should I care to notice, both within and without.
When it comes to yet another cause of the day, euthanisia, my skeptic’s eye glasses over anew; one thought temporarily overriding all incoming sensory perception: ‘What’re they up to now?’
Perhaps there are good reasons not to glamourize nor Romanticize the urge to a young, tragic and rather public demise in addition to the moral questions death raises?
Or at least, maybe just teach the kids some Romeo and Juliet:
‘But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!’
I positively relish the day our academic, political and media ‘intelligentsia’ give this latest cause the dignity it so richly deserves.
If I were Dutch, I would not be altogether reassured by the ease with which it was widely (though mistakenly) believed that a 17-year-old girl named Noa Pothoven was put to death by doctors because of her unbearable mental suffering, rather than the fact that she was actually allowed to refuse all food and drink until she died of dehydration.’
and:
‘There was something distinctly histrionic or self-advertising about her suicide. She did not go quietly: she advertised or broadcast what she was going to do, and why she was going to do it. She did not want to shuffle off this mortal coil: she wanted to make a mark, to enter history. And she succeeded.’
There certainly is something rather histrionic and hysterical in the ‘environment’ these days:
***Bonus points to Dalrymple for mentioning ‘The Sufferings Of Young Werther‘ which I suffered in translation during year twenty-one on this Earth. After spending time with Nietzsche via Walter Kaufman, eternity as a bath house full of spiders, and Rilke’s panther, I was well on my way to having a proper heart of stone.
Toss in some Blake, and ‘Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story Of Wall Street‘, and I’m laughing all the way through the modern fog bank.
See you on the other side, Dear Reader (or not).
Come to think of it, the ‘Youth In Asia,’ probably will have something to do with the future: