Afterward I leave with her and we are carnal.

•

Marcela gets up early; she has different habits and cuts off my sleep.

We go to the agency in the Citroën and she heads for her darkroom. She’ll load the cameras with film, just in case.

I negotiate with the boss, ask him for sixty minutes of his undivided attention, that is, behind closed doors with no one else present.

“Is it urgent?” he inquires, and I say, “Yes and no.” He specifies, “If yes, then now, right now this moment, and if no, then later on in the afternoon.” Always energetic, concrete, and efficient, he makes me feel small, and I’m suddenly overcome with the feeling that what I want to talk to him about is pointless. “This afternoon, or some other day, it doesn’t matter,” I reply. He moves on.

Bibi lifts me out of my abandonment. “You’re making me work,” she says, her tone somewhere between complaint and contentment, and she places the third section of her report in my hands.

(In fact, the fervor Bibi brings to this subject is beginning to make me wonder.)

REJECTERS

Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Napoleon . . .

Albert Camus: “From the absurd, I derive three consequences: my rebellion, my freedom, my passion. Through no more than the play of consciousness, I transform what was an invitation to death into a rule for living: and I reject suicide.”

Kant: “Suicide is abominable because God forbids it. God forbids it because it is abominable.”

Jaime Balmes: “The fundamental reason for the immorality of suicide is that man thereby disturbs the natural order, destroying a thing over which he has no dominion. We merely have usufruct of life, we do not own it; it has been granted to us to eat of the fruits of the tree but with suicide we take the liberty of cutting it down.”

ACCEPTERS

Confucius, Buddha, Diogenes, Seneca, Montaigne, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche . . .

Hegesias of Cyrene, in his philosophical school in Alexandria, encouraged suicide among his disciples. With some success.

The Stoics were defenders of man’s free will and prescribed suicide as the remedy to any woe.

Schopenhauer: “There is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.”

Nietzsche: “One should live in such a way that one may have the will to die at the right time.” “Suicide as ordinary mode of death, with the suicide the new pride of mankind; he fixes the moment of his own death and makes a celebration out of dying.” “The thought of suicide is a great consolation . . .” “Let there be no regret; suicide is quicker.”

EXONERATIONS

For freedom (Kant), honor (the church fathers), many for ideas, the nation, religion, etc. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s, denied that suicide is sinful in every case and asked for charity and compassion (Biathanatos, 1644).

COUNTERPOINTS

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