Books: The Taste of Hemlock

(5 of 5)

True enough. But especially in the 20th century, how is man to ignore the pain and wisdom symbolically acquired by all that foolishness in the Garden of Eden? Sociologists and psychologists tend to assume that fewer people who belong to an organized religion kill themselves, not because they possess a spiritual strength but simply because they belong to a community, which helps allay loneliness. The view is probably wrong. As formal religions have declined, the compulsive human need to believe that life has meaning has created replacement religions, none of them, so far, more than marginally ad equate. In Marxism, the hope of heaven is replaced by an imagined time when the state shall wither away. Existential ism is nothing less than the bare assertion that the meaninglessness of life is what gives it meaning, and in fact makes life worth living. That is what Camus meant in The Myth of Sisyphus when he wrote, "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." Camus decided to live, in the teeth of what he took to be cosmic absurdity. Weaker men often do not.

Their collective suicides are cries for an escape from the self that does not lead to darkness. ∙Timothy Foote