A Strange Place

**Swan Point Cemetery, Providence, RI, Photo by husband Dave



"He laid down his hat and stick and climbed the carpetless stairs to his room. When he entered it he had the shock of feeling himself in a strange place; it did not seem like anything he had ever seen before. Then, one by one, all the old stale usual things in it confronted him, and he longed with a sick intensity to be in a place that was really strange."

That quote is from Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country. It describes the state of mind of Ralph Marvell--failed writer, betrayed husband, ruined scion of an Old New York family--in the moments just before he blows his brains out. There are a lot of memorable suicides in fiction, and lord knows Wharton was fond of dispatching characters that way, but I think Ralph Marvell's is one of the most heartbreaking. He's a delicate soul shredded by the world, not a personality bent on self-destruction. Wharton makes it easy for us to imagine a different fate for him. She was a very cruel writer.

Everyone wants to talk about the "why" of suicide, and there are always plenty of motives on which to speculate: anger, despair, grief, guilt, failure, fear of age and decline--any negative emotion is a plausible culprit. All of which is valid enough, but the trouble with thinking about the cause of a suicide is that it obscures an understanding of what it's actually like to be suicidal. A person about to kill herself--really about to kill herself, with gun bought or pills hoarded--isn't generally tangled up with all those emotions that keep us tied to the world. She may have been pushed into detachment by emotional pain, but she's made a decision to leave that pain behind.

I admire that passage above because I think it captures very accurately the existential state of someone moving toward suicide. At its root, the suicidal impulse is a profound desire to be elsewhere. The suicidal person says, "Anywhere but here, anything but this." She's stating a fierce refusal of what the world offers. But she's also embracing the unknown, and, in a curious way, committing an act of faith. She is consumed with that yearning for strangeness Wharton describes. Humans have an innate desire to see what is over the next hill. Sometimes the hills run out or we go blind to them in this life, and the place of supreme strangeness begins calling to us. That's why it's futile to try to talk someone out of killing herself by telling her how much she's loved, or how this life will get better. She can't hear comforting words. She's listening to something else.

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Members of the perfume community will know that I was inspired to write this because of the recent death of Theresa Duncan, who, among other things, was a widely admired perfume writer. But, as the ever-insightful Leopoldo said elsewhere, the suicidal impulse is ordinary. I am intimately acquainted with it, as I suspect many of you are. I'm not trying to analyze Duncan or pass judgment on the manner of her death. I'm just trying to get a grip, however uncertain, on the mystery of self-destruction as I have known it and observed it. I'm sure some of my thinking is shaped by A. Alvarez's The Savage God, which I read as a teenager, but only vaguely remember. Time to revisit it, I think.


**Swan Point Cemetery is a very beautiful old graveyard and arboretum in Providence. If you are ever in that city, it is well worth a visit. There are some pictures on the website I linked to, but they really don't do the place justice. Dave took some much nicer ones which I'll post one of these days.