Since I'm now feeling depressed, it is my duty to make you, Dear Reader, feel depressed along with me because, as the popular saying goes, suicidality loves company. What put me in this funk? In trying to confirm that Virginia Woolf had walked into a river and not a lake when she filled her coat pockets with rocks and stepped into the water, I read her heartbreaking suicide note to her husband. I was, in fact, reading the note aloud to my boss when my throat tightened and I couldn't continue. It's a sad, sad note, and the only half-joke I could make of the situation, when I found my voice again, was to say that this sort of thing would really resonate with Koreans—the self-sacrificing, dramatic nature of the note sounds like any number of real-life and fictional TV suicides in Korean society. Suicide in Korea is often portrayed as an "I'm doing this for others" situation, something of a rebuttal to the notion, articulated on this blog and in much of the West, that suicide is a fundamentally selfish act because the person committing suicide hasn't thought about the consequences to those around her. It's hard for me not to think of suicide as ultimately selfish, but I have to remember that Koreans are a group-first people, so the notion of altruistic suicide probably makes total sense from the Korean point of view. Sacrifice yourself for the hive.
Please now depress yourself by reading Woolf's Korean-sounding note to her beloved husband. To modern eyes, this screams clinical depression. And if you're unaffected by the note, you're either not human or made of far steelier stuff than me.
Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.
Woolf drowned herself in a river named Ouse (yes, pronounced "ooze"). She killed herself on March 28, 1941, and her body wasn't found until April 18. I'm trying not to imagine how funky she must've looked by then, but I have a vivid, horror-movie imagination.
Not sure how you came across this particularly famous quote, but as a comparative lit (yes, it's about as useful as basket weaving, but a lot more dramatic) major, I must add Michael Cunningham's response to her final choice in his semi-biographical fictional account of Woolf's last days in "The Hours." He writes, “That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.” His novel was made into a feature film of the same name, and the three interwoven stories in "The Hours" are about as good an examination of the human condition as you'll find since Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road." (Indeed, although Cunningham is in many ways Woolf's alter ego, I actually prefer his writing to Woolf's.) Here's the clip from the movie of her writing the suicide note you quoted and her husband Leonard reading it: (Viewer discretion advised) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP-Ih1ENGn4
ReplyDeleteDan,
ReplyDeleteMy source? Just good old Wikipedia.
I have an MA in religious studies, which has served me not at all in my career as, initially, a language teacher, then as an EFL-textbook content creator. The early years of this blog contain many posts about religion, but right around the time my mom died of brain cancer, I lost most of my interest in talking about that topic. By contrast, my bachelor's degree in French (which included courses in pedagogical linguistics, educational principles, etc.) has stood me in good stead. I thought life would go in one direction (religion prof), but it ended up going in a totally different, language-related direction.
Thanks for your meaty comment and the video link. I suddenly have a desire to watch "The Hours," a film I've never seen before. I'll put it in my queue.
At least I was right about Woolf walking into a river.