Jump! Jump! Jump!

This morning I finished reading You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe.

It left me with a lot to ponder.

In one chapter the story revolves around the suicide of a guy who jumps from a twelfth story window. Wolfe sets it against the backdrop that the vast majority of people in the world live boring, meaningless lives.

Sheep who trudge through life with head down, experiencing little pleasure, sacrificng their dreams for small money and insulting jobs, going nowhere but directly to the grave. Suffocating in pettiness and envy along the way.

A crowd gathers around the body on the sidewalk, skull broken open, brain splattered all over the place.

At first they are shocked. 

It doesn't take long for the perspective to come around to the fact that the guy who jumped was selfish. That he could have landed on and killed somebody else. That someone is going to have to clean up the mess. That he should have killed himself in private instead of creating a spectacle. 

Wolfe makes the point that the real reason these people are outraged is because the guy who committed suicide disturbed the flow of the predictable and boring lives of the crowd. They can't just go on with their day as they normally would - they have been confronted with reality. He interrupted their self-imposed comas. Now they have to make the effort to shake it off and get back to "normal."

They are insulted.

Before he jumped, the guy was just like everybody else. Staggering blindly through life. But suicide separated him from the crowd. In a weird way it brought him back to life.

It's a disturbing point of view that Wolfe presents. That the jumper was dead in his life, and only came alive when he killed himself. 

This is really what the crowd is so disturbed about. His decision to jump highlights their spineless refusal to live their own lives. They don't want to see it, they don't want to know about it. Because if they are forced to think about it, suicide becomes the logical solution to the lives they lead.

They just want to shuffle through another day, and go home to numb themselves with whatever poison suits them.

This is an extreme argument, but it does drive home the point that wasting a life is a heinous crime against humanity, punishable by death.

The sooner the better.

Or you could just buy yourself a new hat.