/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11346382]

Why do so many writers kill themselves?

[Anonymous No.11346392]

Life is no joke man, and that's that!

[Anonymous No.11346395]

Which writer had the most alpha suicide?

[Anonymous No.11346404]

>>11346395
Mish is near the top, that dude who blew his brains out in front of notre dame is up there to

[Anonymous No.11346423]

>>11346392
No writer worth his salt wouldn't contemplete suicide at some point, and that's so important, so incredibly important, you know. Every life is a tragedy.

[Anonymous No.11346434]

>>11346404
Wasn’t mish’s kind of embarrassing though? Didn’t he try to start a revolution or something but everyone just giggled at him? Didn’t the guy who was supposed to cut his head of fail?

[Anonymous No.11346452]

>>11346434
That's pretty hardcore compared to killing yourself "because you're sad" :(

[Anonymous No.11346460]

>>11346434

>implying Mish didn't know the coup would fail

he just wanted to go out with a bang

[Anonymous No.11346538]

>>11346434
>Didn’t the guy who was supposed to cut his head of fail?

He got nauseated by the smell of mishima's bowels: none of them expected that, but the fact is that when you slice off someone's intestines the stench of bacterial-digestion and fecal-matter is quite strong.

[Anonymous No.11346544]

>>11346395
Mainländer
>From February of that year on, Mainländer's mental collapse – which has been compared to the collapse Nietzsche would suffer years later[10] – became apparent. Eventually, descending into megalomania and believing himself to be a messiah of social democracy,[9]:124 on the night on April 1, 1876, Mainländer hanged himself in his residence in Offenbach, using a pile of copies of The Philosophy of Redemption (which had arrived the previous day from his publisher) as a platform. He was thirty-four years old.

[Anonymous No.11346547]

Because life is a joke

[Anonymous No.11346551]

>>11346538
>Plan your suicide to be a statement of transcendent beauty after fetishising it for years
>End up smelling like feces as your cringing subordinate hurriedly tries and fails to hack your head off

JUST

[Anonymous No.11346644]

cause writing is the last resource of a repressed mind. but after it happens, you have nothing else to do, it is too good a resource. after you do it, the game is over... and the game is not meant to be won, it is meant to be played as long as you can.

real writers only arise when a social transition is in course, for in those moments society is not effective in giving people a stable worldview. these writers provide the bricks with which next generations will build stability in the new world that comes after the transition.

[Anonymous No.11346670]

>>11346382
what do you mean, fella?

[Anonymous No.11346783]

>>11346395
I forgot his name, but there was one German philosopher who read Schopenhauer and took his philosophy to its logical conclusion of comitting suicide. He then got the book published and was sent some copies of said book sent to him by his publisher. He used his books as a stand to help hang himself

[Anonymous No.11347083]

>>11346392
Wash your penis

[Anonymous No.11347336]

>>11346395
Mitchell Heisman.

[Anonymous No.11347419]

>>11347336
This

[Anonymous No.11347428]

They realize they've wasted their lives on literature

[Anonymous No.11347432]

Because they didn't get into mathematics.

[Anonymous No.11347450]

Examining human experience too closely makes many people pessimistic.

[Anonymous No.11347523]

>>11346434
The coup was supposed to fail

[Anonymous No.11347653]

>>11347336
I concur

[Anonymous No.11347656]

>>11346382
Idk

[Anonymous No.11347658]

>>11346460
>>11347523
>it w-w-was m-meant to s-suck you guys! muh based homo nip would never be cringe

[Anonymous No.11347660]

>>11346670
this post is probably the man himself

[Anonymous No.11347675]

>>11346382
because of the libido

[Anonymous No.11347692]

>>11347336
>discovers that life is meaningless
>doesnt laugh it off and spend his life writing shitpost anthologies

Fail to see how this is a win?

[Anonymous No.11347694]

>Socrates
>Seneca
>Heinrich von Kleist
>Hart Crane
>Freud
>Walter Benjamin
>Woolf
>Zweig
>Adolf Hitler
>Pavese
>Hemingway
>Mishima
>Kawabata
>John Berryman
>Sylvia Plath
>Anne Sexton
>Arthur Koestler
>Primo Levi
>Jerzy Kosinski
>Hunter S Thompson
>DFW
>Anon

[Anonymous No.11347697]

>>11347694

any more? forgot about Akutagawa

[Anonymous No.11347722]

>>11347694
>Brautigan
>Deleuze

[Anonymous No.11347733]

>>11347658
His intention was to create a situation in which an honorable seppuku suicide was 'necessary'. You can't rightfully commit ritual suicide in your bedroom.

[Anonymous No.11347776]

>>11346395
Also, read The Manuscript Found in Saragossa already.

[Anonymous No.11347867]

>>11347733
Completely artificial and tacky. Ewww. Good thing he ended up dead.

[Anonymous No.11347884]

>>11346382
cause they're virgins

[Anonymous No.11347888]

>>11347694

There was something so unbelievably poetic about Virginia Woolf's suicide. It's not healthy how much I fixate on the surreal nature of filling your pockets with stones and just walking into a river, surrendering your body to the tides.

If I ever off myself, I can only imagine I would do something similar.

[Anonymous No.11347891]

>>11346395
Ambrose Bierce disappeared into Mexico and was never heard from again. Pretty chaddy, considering his disdain for society.

[Anonymous No.11347903]

>>11347867
I think the motive in spring snow makes his suicide clearer. He hated the idea that people would judge him based on the age he lived and wanted to show the world he was a chad samurai not a showa gaijin loving cuck

[Anonymous No.11347968]

WEININGER

[Anonymous No.11348150]

>>11346382
they don't
you just know of the ones that do, they wouldn't be nearly as relevant without it.

[Anonymous No.11349035]

>>11346382
being surrounded by idiots all the time makes them depressed and drives them to take their own lives because idiots are idiots and understand nothing... that isolation/alienation is what drives writers, who usually are not idiots, to take their lives

[Anonymous No.11349148]

Killing yourself is an amazing way to market your book.

[Anonymous No.11349178]

>>11346783
Philipp Mainländer

[Anonymous No.11349350]

>Killing yourself because one of your writer friends killed themselves

[Anonymous No.11349360]

[Anonymous No.11349363]

>implying John Kennedy Toole's wasn't the most tragic

[Anonymous No.11349518]

>>11349178
That's him thanks anon. Would you know where I can find an English translation of his book? Can't find it anywhere.

[Anonymous No.11349652]

>>11347694
Stig Dagerman

[Anonymous No.11349687]

>>11347694
>Harry Crosby

[Anonymous No.11349762]

Writing is a lonely profession.

[Anonymous No.11349789]

>>11347697
>Akutagawa
I really don't get it. He looks so fucking smug on all his pictures, but then again, Kappa shows that he was disillusioned when it came to his nations society.

>>11349350
I'm surprised the didn't kill himself immediately in 1945 and spent the next years lamenting on the passing of traditional Japan.

[Anonymous No.11349797]

>>11347694
>Tfw you tried to commit suicide five times but still don't make it onto anon's list

[Anonymous No.11349838]

>>11347694
Don't forget weininger faggot

[Anonymous No.11349842]

>>11347694
I want to know how each of these committed suicide.

[Anonymous No.11349876]

>>11346395
definitely Mishima
>staging an imperialist coup for the sole purpose of creating a dramatic setting to kill yourself in
absolutely alpha

[Anonymous No.11350473]

>>11347888
are you a qt girl?

[Anonymous No.11350524]

>>11349838
>that 23 year old boomer who looks like 45 on his deathbed

[Anonymous No.11350539]

>>11346434
No, he just wanted a Romantic death, he feared the idea of dying of old age.

[Anonymous No.11350549]

>>11349842
Then google it, you fucking retard.

[Anonymous No.11350562]

>>11346392

Life is a joke, for happy people.

Suicides are committed by people who take life seriously and make themselves the joke.

[Anonymous No.11350594]

>>11350562
not him, but you are not in the accurate.

life is a joke that has serious consequences for normal, what you call happy, people. they speak and agree about those consequences indirectly, through their jokes.

suicide is committed by those who treat that same seriousness bare, without the mediation of comedy or something else. their legacy is the raw material to make new jokes.

[Anonymous No.11350658]

>>11346382
The best works are always written when the writer is on the edge.

[Anonymous No.11350723]

>>11346382
We're of high IQ. From a cost-benefit standpoint, life is a scam that begets pain and failure far more than it does comfort and success. Some high IQs reach the universal conclusion early on--to avoid suffering, simply stop suffering and end existence. Others try to convince themselves that hey, this suffering stuff's not so bad once you get used to it! Sure I would choose the warm safety of sleep over being set on fire, but since I've repeatedly opted for being set on fire, might as well opt for it again. This is their way of coping with being on fire, and sometimes it produces works of interest to other people on fire.

[Anonymous No.11350759]

>>11350723
>implying that there isn't another fire waiting on the other side

[Anonymous No.11350762]

If your favourite author died from anything other than suicide you have shit tase.

[Anonymous No.11350766]

>>11346395
>literally no one says Seneca
what the FUCK /lit/

[Anonymous No.11350781]

>>11350766
As for Seneca himself, his age and diet were blamed for slow loss of blood and extended pain rather than a quick death; he also took poison, which was also not fatal. After dictating his last words to a scribe, and with a circle of friends attending him in his home, he immersed himself in a warm bath, which was expected to speed blood flow and ease his pain. Tacitus wrote, "He was then carried into a bath, with the steam of which he was suffocated, and he was burnt without any of the usual funeral rites

[Anonymous No.11350910]

>>11350766
Cicero's death over Seneca's

[Anonymous No.11350953]

Vonnegut on Pancake:
>I give you my word of honor that he is merely the best writer, the most sincere writer I've ever read. What I suspect is that it hurt too much, was no fun at all to be that good. You and I will never know.

[Anonymous No.11351060]

>>11349797
He drowned, along with his waifu in the end.

[Anonymous No.11351186]

>>11347694
Primo Levi is debatable anon

[Anonymous No.11351442]

>>11347658
Oh no. Creating a failed coup is pretty cringe

[Anonymous No.11351925]

>>11349797
i lol'd 8.5/10

[Anonymous No.11351943]

Because lots of humans kill themselves
>>Thread

[Anonymous No.11351956]

>>11346392
life is a joke the people that kill themselves just don't get it

[Anonymous No.11352142]

>>11347694

>Adolf Hitler

[Anonymous No.11352318]

Life is in essence just an uncaring meatgrinder that has been running for billions of years. We're replicating machines and our genes don't care about our wellbeing, all that matters is that they get passed on. We're no different than the baser animals save for our larger brains which just gives us better tricks to get our next fix of pleasure and avoid all the hurt nature throws at us. My field is in neuroscience and while it isn't really at the point to inform ethics, there's some pretty disturbing facts we can draw from it. For one, pain is far more salient than pleasure. It affects learning more and can change our baseline feeling of contentment far more and in the long term, whereas pleasure is subject to the hedonic treadmill, and any increase in pleasure will be fleeting with almost no lasting effect on contentment. It's also well known that pessimism is more correlated with health than optimism, suggesting that the driving factor of a good life is similar to the epicurean idea of the absence of pain = good. Pain and suffering is also much more fundamental than pleasure. We have receptors for pain, but there is no equivalent for pleasure. Pleasure is also dividable into two separate neural circuits: one for liking and one for wanting, this is not the case for pain, which is always aversive and disliked. It is also the case that many of our pleasures (though not all, I'm not a strict deprivationalist) are merely the cause of a decrease in pain, a simple illustration of this is the feeling of pleasure that can be induced by changing a painful stimulus to a less painful stimulus. Furthermore, keep in mind that the greatest pleasures don't hold a candle to the worst pains and this can form a pretty grim picture indeed.

All this to say that I think writers kill themselves because they are usually very introspective people, they think about the world and about their life more than most. They sublimate their experiences and existential dread into their writings whereas the "happy" masses are more likely to distract themselves or turn a blind eye from the negative in the world. Life can be a positive, but to some it can feel like an imposition, a catch-22 where neither continuing to live nor dying is desirable.

[Anonymous No.11352344]

>>11350473

>girls
>on 4chan