Walker Percy, who’s something of a hero of mine, wrote often of suicide. In the hilarious and brilliant Lost in the Cosmos, he idly explored the liberating power of the genuine yet failed suicide attempt: oppressed by your despair, trapped in your collapsing psyche with its failed sense of scale, overwhelmed and lost, you fire a gun into your mouth, having checked the chamber and switched off the safety. Despite every intention of killing yourself, you fail: the gun jams, and after the ‘click’ which you expect to end your life you hear the hum of your air conditioner, perhaps a passing car.
Percy thought that this would precipitate a sudden release, a sense that you’d rejected life, opted out, but lived to reflect on it; there would be a kind of triumph. Knowing several suicides and not always being an ecstatic camper myself, I don’t know how generally this would be the case (if it would be at all), but there is something to the idea that confronting death exhilarates, restoring to you a sense of radical autonomy and selfhood. Hence daredevil sports, etc.
That’s why I am jealous as fuck of the people in this video (thanks, Kevin!). I have told dozens of people that one dream of mine is to experience a fatality-free plane crash, a doubly-unlikely fantasy, but one which I think would be extraordinary: the fear, the powerlessness, the physical terror, then: the sun, the grass, the air.
