Your end was premeditated. You had conceived of a scenario where your body would be found immediately after your death. You didn’t want it to stay there decomposing for days, for it to be found rotten like that of some forgotten hermit. You did violence to your living body, but you didn’t want it to be found, in death, victim to degradations other than those you had inflicted on it yourself.
— Édouard Levé, from “Suicide.”
You sat down on the couch and felt a violent pain in your temples, as if a caliper were slowly tightening on them. You tapped your fingers on your head; it sounded hollow like a dead man’s skull. Suddenly, you no longer had a brain. Or rather, it was another person’s brain. You sat like this for two hours, asking yourself if you were yourself.
— Édouard Levé, from “Suicide.”
This was perhaps what you feared: to become inert in a body that still breathes, drinks, and feeds itself. To commit suicide in slow motion.
— Édouard Levé, from “Suicide.”
Sun, heat, and light, which delighted those around you, appeared to you as perturbations of your solitude, summons to the outdoors, obligations to joy. You refused to have your euphoria put down to climate. You wanted to be solely responsible for it. If you were asked to do something on account of the good weather, you declined the invitation. Gray weather, winter, rain, or cold did not displease you. Nature then seemed to be in tune with your mood. If the weather was poor, you would be let off the hook, no one would think of reproaching you for not going out. You could stay at your place without the anomalous appearance of your shutting yourself in. No one would come around asking questions about your taste for staying indoors.
— Édouard Levé, from “Suicide.”
You were not now afraid of ghosts: you had already been thinking about death so often, for such a long time, that they had become quite familiar to you. To see these graves in the penumbra reassured you, as if you had come to a silent ball organized by benevolent friends. You were the only outsider there, the living person surrounded by recumbent statues that love him.
— Édouard Levé, from “Suicide.”
Facing your mirror, happy or carefree, you were someone. Unhappy, you weren’t anyone any longer: the lines of your face would fade; you would recognize what you habitually used to call “me,” but you would see someone else looking at you. Your gaze would sweep across your face as if it were made of air: the eyes opposite you would be unfathomable. To animate your features with a wink or a grimace would be of no help: deprived of reason, the expression would be artificial. And so you would play at miming conversations with imaginary third parties. You would believe yourself to be going mad, but the ridiculousness of your situation would end up making you laugh. Acting out the roles in a comedy sketch would let you exist anew. You would become yourself again by embodying someone else. Your eyes would now rest on themselves and, facing the mirror, you could again say your name without it sounding like an abstraction.
— Édouard Levé, from “Suicide.”
You were not surprised to feel yourself ill adapted to the world, but it did surprise you that the world had produced a being who now lived in it as a foreigner. Do plants commit suicide? Do animals die of hopelessness? They either function or disappear. You were perhaps a weak link, an accidental evolutionary dead end, a temporary anomaly not destined to burgeon again.
— Édouard Levé, from “Suicide.”
Only the living seem incoherent. Death closes the series of events that constitutes their lives. So we resign ourselves to finding a meaning for them. To refuse them this would amount to accepting that a life, and thus life itself, is absurd. Yours had not yet attained the coherence of things done. Your death gave it this coherence.
— Édouard Levé, from “Suicide.”
You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded.
— Édouard Levé, from “Suicide.”
When I hear of a suicide, I think of you again. Yet, when I hear that someone died of cancer, I don’t think of my grandfather and grandmother, who also died of it. They share cancer with millions of others. You, however, own suicide.
— Édouard Levé, from “Suicide.”