No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.

~ Al Álvarez

Al Álvarez Death Suicide

Suicide creates his own society: to shut yourself off from other people in some dingy, rented box and stare, like Melville's Bartleby, day in and day out at the dead wall outside your window is in itself a rejection of the world which is said to be rejecting you. It is a way of saying, like Bartleby, 'I prefer not to' to every offer and every possibility, which is a condition no amount of social engineering will cure.

~ Al Álvarez

Al Álvarez Bartleby Box Cure Dead Dingy Offer People Possibility Rejection Shut Social Engineering Society Suicide Wall Window World

Suicide is a confession of failure. And like divorce, it is shrouded in excuses and rationalizations spun endlessly to disguise the simple fact that all one's energy, passion, appetite and ambition have been aborted.

~ Al Álvarez

Al Álvarez Aborted Ambition Appetite Confession Disguise Divorce Energy Excuses Failure Passion Rationalizations Suicide

From that altitude, the world looked calm and vivid and possible. But by the time we landed at Prestwick the clouds were down like the black cap on a hanging judge.

~ Al Álvarez

Al Álvarez Depression

[Sylvia Plath] was now far along a peculiarly solitary road on which not many would risk following her. So it was important for her to know that her messages were coming back clear and strong. Yet not even her determinedly bright self-reliance could disguise the loneliness that came from her almost palpably, like a heat haze. She asked for neither sympathy nor help but, like bereaved widow at a wake, she simply wanted company in her mourning.

~ Al Álvarez

Al Álvarez Clear Company Follow Help Loneliness Messages Mourning Risk Road Self Reliance Solitary Strong Sylvia Plath Sympathy Widow

Suicide may be a declaration of bankruptcy which passes judgement on a life as one long history of failures. But it is a history which also amounts at least to this one decision which, by its very finality, is not wholly a failure. Some kind of minimal freedom — the freedom to die in one's own way and in one's own time — has been salvaged from the wreck of all those unwanted necessities.

~ Al Álvarez

Al Álvarez Death Suicide

The pity is not that there is a myth of Sylvia Plath but that the myth is not simply that of an enormously gifted poet whose death came carelessly, by mistake, and too soon.

~ Al Álvarez

Al Álvarez Carelessness Death Gift Gifted Mistake Myth Pity Poet Soon Sylvia Plath Too Soon

For the artist himself art is not necessarily therapeutic; he is not automatically relieved of his fantasies by expressing them. Instead, by some perverse logic of creation, the act of formal expressions may simply make the dredged-up material more readily available to him.

~ Al Álvarez

Al Álvarez Art Artist Creation Fantasies Logic Relief Relieved Therapeutic