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Mexico’s masked vigilantes defy drug gangs — and the law

By Nicholas Casey
wsj

AYUTLA, Mexico—Masked men, rifles slung over their shoulders, stand guard on a lonely rural road, checking IDs and questioning travelers. They wear no uniforms, flash no badges, but they are the law here now.

A dozen villages in the area have risen up in armed revolt against local drug traffickers that have terrorized the region and a government that residents say is incapable of protecting them from organized crime.

The villages in the hilly southern Mexican state of Guerrero now forbid the Mexican army and state and federal police from entering. Ragtag militias carrying a motley arsenal of machetes, old hunting rifles and the occasional AR-15 semiautomatic rifle control the towns. Strangers aren’t allowed entry. There is a 10 p.m. curfew. More than 50 prisoners, accused of being in drug gangs, sit in makeshift jails. Their fates hinge on public trials that began Thursday when the accused were arraigned before villagers, who will act as judge and jury.

Crime is way down—for the moment, at least. Residents say kidnapping ceased when the militias took charge, as did the extortions that had become the scourge of businessmen and farmers alike. The leader of one militia group, who uses the code name G-1 but was identified by his compatriots as Gonzalo Torres, puts it this way: “We brought order back to a place where there had been chaos. We were able to do in 15 days what the government was not able to do in years.”

Yet a few shaken townspeople in Ayutla, the area’s primary town, have stories of being arrested and held for more than a week before being deemed innocent and released. And one man was shot dead trying to escape the masked men at a checkpoint.

Village justice has long been part of life in rural Mexico. Now it’s playing a growing role in the country’s drug war. Across Mexico, from towns outside the capital to along the troubled border with the U.S., mobs have lynched suspected drug traffickers and shot those accused of aiding them. Last year a logging town in a neighboring state took up arms when traffickers of La Familia Michoacana, a drug cartel, attempted to lay claim to their forests.

The uprising around Ayutla, a two-hour drive from the resort city of Acapulco, differs from the others because it has started to spread locally. In the two weeks, bands in six other towns in Guerrero state have declared vigilante rule, including in Iguala, a city of 140,000. In the nearby Jalisco state, groups say they are considering similar action.

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Some government officials are even siding with the militias, for now. Guerrero Governor Ángel Aguirre has met with the vigilantes and says state law gives villagers the right to self-rule. Ayutla’s mayor, Severo Castro, says he welcomes the new groups. On a recent evening, he pointed toward a checkpoint blocks away and said the town is nearly crime-free for the first time in years.

“There are two police departments now,” he said. “The ones in uniform and another masked one, which is much more brave.”

That sentiment seems to be shared even among local police, who are still technically on duty but who now seem limited to the role of directing traffic around the central square, leaving the rest of the patrolling and police work to the militias.

Police Commander Juan Venancio, a broad-faced middle-aged man with a mustache, said local police are too afraid of organized crime to make arrests.

“We could arrest a gangster for extortion, but if we couldn’t prove it, we’d have to let him go,” he said. “But then what about our families? Do you think we’re not scared they will take revenge on us if they are out? Of course we are scared.”

In some ways, life is getting back to normal here after years of insecurity. Village rodeos attract young cowboys and girls in traditional dresses, and weddings stretch late into the evening. The same townspeople who were once extorted by drug gangs now bring melons and tamales to the militiamen standing guard at checkpoints.

Suspicion of the government and outsiders runs high here. During a visit by The Wall Street Journal last week to the nearby hamlet of Azozuca, rumor spread that the reporter’s car was bringing state human-rights officials. An angry, stick-wielding mob of about 150 blocked the only road into town and didn’t allow the reporter to enter.

“Get out of here! Don’t take another step!” yelled a woman waving a wooden bat.

Remote villages in Guerrero, one of Mexico’s most independent regions, had long complained that too few police looked after their towns. In 1995, the state passed a law allowing towns to form “community police” groups that worked much like neighborhood-watch organizations, permitting the groups to detain suspects and hand them over to authorities. But the laws didn’t allow the groups to pass judgment on those accused.

By 2006, Mexico’s drug war had begun to weaken its already-troubled institutions. Areas like Mexico City remained under tight control, but the power of the state in rural areas diminished. Some 65,000 Mexicans have been killed since 2006, but only a fraction of the killings have been solved—or even investigated, according to the government and legal experts.

“Mexico has a 2% conviction rate, and Mexicans have taken note of that,” says Sergio Pastrana, a sociology professor at the College of Guerrero who has studied rural regions. “It’s caused unrest and a determination among some to take the reins themselves.”

Villagers in Ayutla say the town was never crime-free—bandits sometimes robbed horsemen riding the road, for example—but the specter of organized crime was something new.

Several years ago, a group known by villagers as Los Pelones—literally, the Bald Ones—entered Ayutla and began a racket which included both drugs and other crime, people here say.

Mr. Castro, the mayor, says his 19-year-old daughter was kidnapped two years ago and he paid a “large sum” for her release. Last July, the body of the town’s police chief Óscar Suástegui was found in a garbage dump outside town. He had been shot 13 times. Authorities said it looked like the work of a criminal group. No arrests were made in either case.

Townspeople say Los Pelones moved into extortions last year, demanding protection money from those who ran stalls in the market adjoining Ayutla’s central plaza. The payments were usually 500 pesos, or $40, a month per stall, according to several vendors, a large sum in the impoverished town.

As harvest season approached last fall, the group fanned out into the countryside, demanding monthly payments of 200 pesos, about $16, for each animal that farmers owned. Several farmers say the gang made a list of those who had agreed to pay and those who had not.

In November, a spate of kidnappings began. Gunmen in the village of Plan de Gatica captured the village commissioner, a kind of locally elected mayor, along with a priest in a nearby village who had refused to pay extortion fees for his church. A second commissioner was kidnapped in the village of Ahuacachahue in December. The three men eventually were released after ransoms were paid, villagers say.

When a village commissioner named Eusebio García was captured on Jan. 5, several dozen villagers from Rancho Nuevo grabbed weapons and formed a search party. The next morning, they found Mr. García in a nearby house with his kidnappers, who were arrested and jailed, say the militiamen.

“This was the turning point, the moment everything exploded here,” says Bruno Placido, one of the leaders of the armed groups. “We had shown the power armed people have over organized-crime groups.”

As word spread of Mr. García’s release, farmers in villages around Ayutla also took up arms. Their plan: to descend into Ayutla, where they believed the rest of the Los Pelones gang was based. That night they raided numerous homes throughout Ayutla, arresting people they believed to be lookouts, drug dealers, kidnappers and hit men, and brought them to makeshift jails. Other villagers set up checkpoints across the town.

The vigilantes were now in charge. They instituted the curfew and declared that state and federal authorities would be turned away at checkpoints. Villagers were allowed to make accusations against others, anonymously, at the homes of militiamen.

The group ordered most schools shut down, saying Los Pelones might try to take children hostage in exchange for prisoners detained by the vigilantes.

“I hadn’t seen anything quite like this before,” says state Education Secretary Silvia Romero, who traveled to Ayutla after the initial uprising to negotiate for classes to resume. Some teachers agreed that suspending school was necessary until all top gang leaders were under lock and key. “The students were an easy target for the criminals,” says teacher Ignacio Vargas.

Many schools have since reopened. The army, after negotiations, set up a checkpoint at the entrance to the region. Beyond that, the militiamen remain in control and no state or federal officials are permitted to enter the villages around Ayutla.

Townspeople interviewed recently said the masked men are ordinary farmers and businessmen, not rival criminals looking to oust Los Pelones. The mayor agrees. Still, Mr. Torres, the lead militiaman in Ayutla, acknowledged the risk of “spies from organized crime coming into our ranks.” He said he encourages his men to turn in anyone seeking to join the vigilantes who might be linked to crime groups.

The militias are moving beyond the drug gangs to other alleged crimes and, in the process, are revealing some of the pitfalls of village justice.

On a recent day, two pickup trucks filled with masked men pulled up carrying bar owner Juan de Dios Acevedo. They alleged that Mr. Acevedo, 42, had been involved in the rape of a local woman. One of them pulled a shirt over his head while another bound his hands with rope. His mother and sister comforted him and cried.

As he was being bundled into one pickup, his mother fetched signed papers from the local prosecutor’s office that said he had already been arrested for the same crime, and cleared by prosecutors. “This is a false accusation, and now I’ve been arrested for the second time,” Mr. Acevedo protested.

The vigilantes were unmoved and took him away for questioning. Later that day, he was released unharmed.

A makeshift detention center run by villagers in El Mezón is home to two dozen men and women accused of being with Los Pelones. There is no budget to run the prison, villagers say. The prisoners eat donated tortillas and rice and sleep on cardboard on the floor. On a recent afternoon, seven men were clustered behind bars in a tiny, dark room that smelled of urine. It was hot and dirty. There were no visible signs of physical abuse.

The masked commander of the facility, who wouldn’t give his name and declined to allow interviews with the prisoners, said the men are being treated well and will be given a chance to defend themselves in a public trial in the village. They won’t be allowed lawyers, he said, and villagers will decide their sentences by a consensus vote.

Possible punishments include hard labor constructing roads and bridges in chain gangs, he said, although it will be up to the villagers, not the militia, to decide. He added that executions, which are not permitted under Mexican law even in murder cases, were not on the table.

“The village will be their judge,” he said. “If the village saves you, you will be free. If not, then you are condemned.”

Nightly raids of suspected drug traffickers have provided the militiamen with a clutch of high-powered weapons, including AR-15 rifles. It isn’t clear how the men will be trained to use the weapons.

On Jan. 6, the night the checkpoints were erected, a man named Cutberto Luna was shot dead by the vigilantes, state authorities say. Mr. Torres, the Ayutla militia commander, says the man refused to stop at the checkpoint and opened fire on the men standing guard, who responded by firing back. He also alleges Mr. Luna was a “known leader of organized crime.”

Members of Mr. Luna’s family couldn’t be located for comment. The state prosecutor’s file on the case says Mr. Luna was a local taxi driver. The file makes no mention of organized-crime ties. No arrests have been made in the killing.

On a recent day, a group of militiamen in the village of Potreros discussed what lay ahead. A rancher in a nearby town was thought to have collected extortion money on behalf of the criminal gangs. Several militia members wanted to organize a raid to take back the money, then use it to buy ammunition. The men also discussed the merits of shooting on the spot criminals they believed to be guilty rather than taking them to village courts.

A vendor in the Ayutla town plaza is glad to have faced neither fate. He spent 14 days in the El Mezón jail but was released on Jan. 21, he said. The vendor said he was accused of helping an organized-crime member. In fact, he said, he was simply paying his 500 peso weekly extortion fee. He wasn’t harmed in detention, he said, but got sick after he was given dirty water from a nearby pond to drink.

“Clearly I wasn’t on the side of the bad guys,” he said. “Still, I went to jail. The kind of psychological damage this does is great. Now I’m afraid they’ll come back for me and cut off my finger or gouge out my eye.”

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Suicide Watch

By Freya Johnston
the-tls

The gin-crazed girl commits suicide - George Cruikshank

On September 9, 1756, Edward Moore’s journal The World published an eight-page letter from a gentleman in distress. Having abandoned legal, military, and authorial careers, encumbered with debts and much-loved dependants, “John Tristman” now found himself “daily contending betwixt pride and poverty; a mournful relict of misspent youth; a walking dial, with two hands pointing to the lost hours”. This melancholy account takes a surprising turn when the writer begins to divulge his bold new money-making scheme. Tristman is convinced he can put a stop to the vulgar, messy suicides for which the English have become infamous. People who live in London but have somehow tired of life need no longer trust to chance. Now, they may repair to his stylish, centrally located suite of apartments and end their lives “decently as well as suddenly”. For the disappointed lady, Tristman offers a spacious bath in which to drown “with the utmost privacy and elegance”. Despairing actors can take their pick of daggers and poison. Soldiers will conveniently discover “swords fixed obliquely in the floor with their points upwards”.

“The Receptacle for Suicides”, as Tristman dubs his voguish idea, is a Swiftian institution: utterly outrageous and thoroughly plausible. In offering to make the business of self-destruction both private and classy, Tristman takes it indoors and smothers it with euphemisms, of which “sudden death” was among the most popular in the mid-eighteenth century. It befits a cutting-edge projector to refer, in conclusion, to his would-be clients as “suicides”, a fairly unusual term when The World’s satire was published. The Oxford English Dictionary dates “suicide”, in Tristman’s sense of “One who dies by his own hand”, back to 1732, again in a journalistic context. “Suicide” in the sense of “self-murder” is in use decades earlier, and appears to be Thomas Browne’s coinage.

As Kelly McGuire points out in Dying To Be English: Suicide narratives and national identity, 1721–1814, the word has a vexed history. Deploying a pronoun as a prefix in order to describe both an action and a person (a person who is at once victim and perpetrator), it is something of a botched job. The convolutions and impenetrability of the term seem appropriate to a deed which many understand as the consummate rejection – of life, family and community, as of social and religious obligations – although one lesson of all the books under review is that suicides themselves, actual and imagined, tend not to see it that way. Many of the ballads reproduced in The History of Suicide in England, 1650–1850 depict lovers killing themselves in the confident hope of forgiveness and a place in heaven, as of avoiding shame and misery on earth. And even the most hard-line of religious commentators will hesitate to condemn all suicides to hell: as the Calvinist preacher Thomas Beard wrote in 1631, “the mercie of God is incomprehensible”. Overall, there is much evidence of what John Donne called “a perplexitie and flexibilitie in the doctrine” of suicide.

Gradually replacing more overtly judgemental epithets such as “self-murder”, “suicide” became a familiar word in England in the later eighteenth century. Perhaps the availability of a neutral form of language influenced how people thought about voluntary death; there is a relic of the older way of describing it in current references to “self-harm”. It is sometimes argued that apparently more tolerant and sympathetic attitudes to suicide, as to other infractions of the moral law, developed in the eighteenth century as the result of a progressive secularization. But religious as well as civil sanctions against the act persisted, in Britain and in the American colonies – only in Pennsylvania was voluntary death not criminalized – and those official sanctions are not incompatible with sympathy.

No longer construed as a demonic temptation, suicide came instead to be viewed as a symptom of lunacy

A coroner’s pronouncement of suicide (felo da se) resulted in forfeiture of the deceased’s goods and property to the state, often leaving any surviving relatives destitute. So the increasingly common verdict of temporary insanity (non compos mentis) may suggest a change in how people understood the act of self-destruction: no longer construed as a demonic temptation, it came instead to be viewed as a symptom of lunacy. On the other hand, the prevalence of non compos mentis determinations in the coroner’s courts may reveal a pragmatic wish to safeguard cash and property for the living. The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive; it seems likely that people have always been in more than one mind about suicide.

In “Frederic and Elfrida”, Jane Austen’s early novelistic skit (dating from the late 1780s or early 90s), “the lovely Charlotte” finds herself agreeing to marry a handsome stranger within moments of having consented to become the wife of a rich old man. The next day, “the reflection of her past folly, operated so strongly on her mind, that she resolved to be guilty of a greater, and to that end threw herself into a deep stream which ran thro’ her Aunts pleasure Grounds in Portland Place”. The combination of a suggested mental disorder (folly operating strongly on the mind) and cool calculation (“she resolved . . . to that end”) is characteristic of a period in which suicides are presented, by turns, as helpless lunatics and rational agents. The first view makes them not responsible for their actions; the second renders them potentially culpable. After 1823, the bodies of suicides could be interred in consecrated ground and the ritual humiliation of their corpses was officially prohibited. But suicide remained a crime in England until 1961.

As Dignitas, the Swiss right-to-die association, notes on its website, the majority of suicide attempts fail – although a failure in this context might also be counted a success. It is odd to think how many people were, and are, survivors of themselves: part of the OED’s definition of “suicide” is “One who . . . has a tendency to commit suicide”. If you try and fail to perpetrate self-murder you are, technically speaking, a “suicide”. By contrast, in order to qualify as any other kind of murderer, you need to have killed someone outright. In We Shall Be No More: Suicide and self-government in the newly United States, Richard Bell movingly emphasizes the sometimes clumsy efforts of American asylums and humanitarian societies to care for those who tried to kill themselves, but who lived on for days, weeks, or years afterwards. Bell never forgets that suicide is about individuals and the persistence or recovery of their stories. His arresting, involving work on the young American republic brings out the farcical and tragic aspects of suicide. It also reveals a healthy suspicion of commentators in all periods who lament the helter-skelter decline of manners and morals, whether due to changes in legislation or reading habits.

Young, romantic, foolish and idle, consumers of prose fiction in eighteenth-century Britain and America were thought especially vulnerable to suicide; McGuire and Bell chart their sometimes fatal adventures in the realms of sensibility. Critics in both nations liked to whip up alarm at novelists’ apparent contempt of familial and social duties. But fictional tales of unguarded passion, culminating in suicide, may or may not demonstrate what McGuire identifies as “a death drive at work at the level of narrative”. After all, to kill your characters off is one handy way to wind up a plot, especially if you’re trying to avoid the stock conclusion of marriage.

Do human beings instinctively seek to preserve their own lives? Or is the desire to terminate our existence native to our character?

Disputes about suicide have always turned on conceptions of what is natural and unnatural. Do human beings instinctively seek to preserve their own lives? Or is the desire to terminate our existence native to our character? We live in a tangled and immoral world full of death, the most definitive of many injurious agents working against our survival and well-being. How is it possible to insinuate sense and meaning into such a realm? In the attempt to do so, suicide may seem in one mood or context absurd; in another, the only sane way out. John Donne’s Biathanatos, a seminal, heterodox text in the history of voluntary death, was written in 1608 and first published posthumously in 1644 (the work later inspired both Thomas De Quincey and Jorge Luis Borges). Because The History of Suicide in England takes as its start date 1650, it does not include Biathanatos, although the work was reprinted several times after 1644 and many of the authors included here are rebutting, sometimes point by point, what Donne says (or appears to say) in qualified vindication of self-homicide. This arrangement leads to awkwardness: the General Introduction, by Mark Robson, and the introduction to Volume One have to offer a synopsis of Donne’s argument, and substantial quotations from it, in order to make sense of much of what follows.

The problem with Donne’s omission raises a more serious issue with The History of Suicide. What are its basic principles of selection and rejection? Why are the dates 1650–1850 chosen? The General Introduction is hard to follow on this score, arguing that the “years around 1650 do broadly represent a change in thinking about suicide . . . at least in terminology”. The main reason for deciding to begin in 1650 appears to have been that the OED offers a text from that decade as the first known example of the word “suicide” in English. Yet the editors of The History of Suicide have themselves found earlier instances than this, and the terminology is susceptible of many different interpretations, one of which would be that no real change occurs in thinking about voluntary death, even if a new word comes into play.

The History of Suicide is a generically wide-ranging collection, embracing letters, ballads, tracts, depositions, refutations, broadsheets, statistical inquiries, social criticism, individual case studies, and so on. Texts are reproduced in typeset rather than in facsimile form; there is a general essay introducing the edition as a whole, and each document is supplied with a headnote and some annotation at the back of the book. The editors seem, as far as it is possible to judge from the introductions to each volume, to have imagined their work primarily as a storehouse for cultural historians. But those researching the history of suicide would be better off foraging in libraries and electronic databases for themselves. Nothing is said in the preliminary matter about textual or editorial policy. Original page breaks within the copy-texts seem to be indicated by a slash (/), although this is not stated anywhere.

Spot-checks of the primary material against printed and online copies of early editions are discouraging, and suggest that mistakes have been introduced. There are recurrent glitches in punctuation, and a difficulty with apostrophes used to indicate the omission of a letter or letters, which routinely appear the wrong way around (thus ’tis is wrongly rendered ‘tis, ’mongst as ‘mongst and so on). In the course of ten pages of the first volume’s excerpt from Owen Stockton’s Counsel to the Afflicted (1667), the full-text version of which can be downloaded from Early English Books Online, a misprint in the copy-text (“aj” for “a”) has been retained, and new errors have been added, all of which introduce some degree of interpretative confusion. It is hard to see how the high price of The History of Suicide can be justified – given its limited explanatory apparatus, and the ease and speed with which most of its texts may be consulted online, for free or through institutional subscription – if it does not even reproduce its source material accurately.

Suicide can seem to express a heroic self-sufficiency. Cultivating immunity to the ills of this world is bound up with the freedom to destroy oneself when those ills nonetheless, inevitably, attack. David Hume’s chilly essay “On Suicide” (1783) justifies self-destruction on the basis that duty to ourselves supersedes all other obligations. No man would kill himself if his life were worth living, argues Hume, and those who elect to commit suicide when they have become a burden to others set an example that is worthy of imitation. Besides, the natural world is resilient and adaptable: accidents happen, and suicide is one of countless temporary disruptions to the order of things. Seen from this perspective (but what human being really can see from this perspective?), the loss of an individual life “is of no greater importance than an oyster”. To speak and think thus is to ignore the counterargument of the faithful that suicide constitutes a sin, an act of rebellion against God’s sovereignty and those around us: as is said in Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet (1824), “Despair is treason towards man, / And blasphemy to Heaven”. Human beings are created by and dependent on a non-human maker. The Christian virtue of prudence therefore involves guarding the life that does not belong to you, and cannot be yours to dispose of. Voluntarily severing the bond that joins soul with body is to sever a tie with God. As for oysters, “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows” (Matthew 10.29–31).

Numerous believers have made themselves desperate by nursing a sense of their own unique culpability. This kind of suicidal despair – convincing oneself that one is permanently cast out from the possibility of forgiveness – is terrible to read about. Take William Cowper. He was destined for the law, a profession for which, due to his morbid fear of public speaking, he was wholly unsuited. The prospect of being examined in 1763 at the bar of the House of Lords drove him to a series of frantic measures. About a week before the examination he bought a half-ounce of laudanum. Unable to consume the fatal dose, he thought of escaping to France. He resolved to drown himself, then tried to stab himself with his penknife, and finally hanged himself with a scarlet garter which broke just as he lost consciousness. On coming to, he heard the sound of his own groans and assumed he was in hell. A period of bitter misery ensued; Cowper attempted suicide on at least one further occasion. But conversations with his brother and chance readings in the Bible began to chip away at his certainty that he was the helpless prey of a furious, vengeful God. On July 26, 1764 he picked up a Bible and opened it, randomly, at Romans 3.25: “Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God”. In an instant, Cowper found strength to believe in the redeeming power of Christ, and was lost in tears of grateful ecstasy.

Cowper regretted his birth “in a country where melancholy is the national characteristic”, and admitted he had often wished himself a Frenchman. The French themselves apparently referred to suicide as death “à l’Anglaise – according to the English fashion”. The World’s John Tristman was one of many writers at home and abroad to link the English temperament with suicidal tendencies. In 1738, a journalist (possibly Samuel Richardson) claimed that suicide was England’s “new Religion”. Melancholy seemed to infect everyone and everything: even a sedan chair, narrating the history of its life and adventures in London in 1757, admits that it has flirted with self-destruction: “Since my reparation, I have . . . had a very particular dejection of spirits. Whether I am almost tired of a foolish and ridiculous world, I can’t tell . . .”. Two decades later, the Abbé Millot could still remark on “that rage of suicide, whereof England affords so many examples”. The English, he claimed, grow weary of existence “upon principle”. A national proclivity for self-murder was, perhaps, the inescapable counterpart of wealth, leisure, liberty and refinement. Spending power, and the freedom to think, generated variety and originality – hence, the argument ran, the surfeit of excellent English authors. But such benefits also encouraged, as in ancient Rome, effeminacy and madness. And then there was the weather, often presented as a fatal agent in the “English Malady”.

A national proclivity for self-murder was, perhaps, the inescapable counterpart of wealth, leisure, liberty and refinement.

Many eighteenth-century writers argue that trade supports human virtue. Yet trade, reliant on slavery, also generates luxury and the kind of enervation associated with melancholy. Poor people conveniently lacked the time and imagination to kindle suicidal thoughts into action; they were too busy working. A truly aristocratic temperament, on the other hand, was inherently proud and self-destructive, doomed to squander its tremendous gifts and resources. One “well born” correspondent summed the position up with exquisite absurdity in The World, again in 1756: “I grew to think that there was no living without killing oneself”.

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) condemns the act in its definition of “SUICIDE”: “Self-murder; the horrid crime of destroying one’s self”. Beneath this explanation Johnson cites, or rather slightly adapts, Samuel Richardson’s heroine Clarissa writing against voluntary death in the same morally offended register as Johnson’s: “To be cut off by the sword of injured friendship is the most dreadful of all deaths, next to suicide”. Clarissa seems to be assuring us that her own end couldn’t be further removed from such a fate. And yet, as McGuire points out, she also appears to be a textbook suicidal anorexic, persistently fasting after Lovelace’s rape and thereby conferring on herself a slow death that allows her to dispose of her property and execute her last wishes bit by bit. Clarissa persists in her resolve despite a warning from Lovelace’s former mistress, Sally, who says: “Your religion . . . should teach you that starving yourself is Self-Murder”. Yet Clarissa’s end is also that of an exemplary Christian, attended by many affirmations of faith and intimations of immortal glory. She murmurs “O death, where is thy sting?” and “come – blessed Lord – JESUS” as she dies. Richardson comments in the postscript that anyone “earnest in their profession of Christianity will rather envy than regret the triumphant death of CLARISSA”. But that triumph echoes the last days of Cicero’s friend and correspondent, Pomponius Atticus (110–32 BC), who “willingly famished himself to death”, in the words of one seventeenth-century pamphleteer, “and could not be disswaded from so doing by prayers and tears of his nearest and dearest allies and friends”.

Too keen an attachment to food might also amount to an appetite for death. Did Johnson’s friend, the gluttonous brewer Henry Thrale, kill himself through overindulgence? Johnson seems to have thought so, commenting shortly before Thrale’s death in 1781 that “such eating is little better than Suicide”. His wife, Hester Thrale, found these words “remarkable”, but judged it best to say no more. The physician George Cheyne, himself a lifelong dieter whose weight had peaked at 32 stone, argued in 1745 that “he that wantonly transgresseth the self-evident rules of health, is guilty of a degree of self-murder, and a habitual perseverance therein is direct suicide”. Thrale, like Clarissa, had persevered and defied the entreaties of friends and family.

Neither of these deaths is quite in line with the widespread modern aspiration to die with dignity (an aspiration often cited in debates about assisted suicide). But is a dignified exit from this world any more possible or desirable than John Tristman’s drawing-room vision of expiring decently and elegantly? Before the twentieth century, public discussions of voluntary death were not dominated by arguments about whether people ought to be kept alive for years in a condition such as that of locked-in syndrome, although the syndrome itself is nothing new: Noirtier de Villefort in The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) is described as a living corpse, and communicates via ocular movement alone. Yet it is immediately obvious from the painful narratives of love, madness, poverty, crime, violence, degradation and slavery included in the books under review that people have always longed to be allowed to do what they wanted with their own lives and bodies, and many have concluded (in Donne’s words) that: “I have the keyes of my prison in mine owne hand, and no remedy presents it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own sword”. The suicidal desire for freedom whispers to us that we have the means in our power to end our own misery, perhaps even that it is a mark of courage and honour to do so.

Where, then, can we find comfort? What can we do to escape ourselves? Robert Burton recommended in the closing lines of his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) that we should “Be not solitary; be not idle”, advice which Samuel Johnson carefully adapted for “disordered” men such as James Boswell: “If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle”. The end of the Samaritans’ information page on self-harm urgently communicates the same message as that of the first full-length treatise on suicide published in English, John Sym’s Lifes Preservative Against Self-Killing (1637), and it can’t be said often enough: “There is always hope. There is always help”.

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Since shepherds are the same everywhere

Mind you, she had something to say on the subject. Of the thousands of books she had read, among them books on the history of Mexico, the history of Spain, the history of Columbia, the history of religion, the history of the popes of Rome, the advances of NASA, she had come across only a few pages that depicted with complete faithfulness, utter faithfulness, what the boy Benito Juárez must have felt, more than thought, when he went out to pasture with his flock and was sometimes gone for several days and nights, as is the way of these things. Inside that book with a yellow cover everything was expressed so clearly that sometimes Florita Almada thought the author must have been a friend of Benito Juárez and that Benito Juárez had confided all his childhood experiences in the man’s ear. If such a thing were possible. If it were possible to convey what one feels when night falls and the stars come out and one is alone in the vastness, and life’s truths (night truths) begin to march past one by one, somehow swooning or as if the person out in the open were swooning or as if a strange sickness were circulating in the blood unnoticed. What are you doing, moon, up in the sky? asks the little shepherd in the poem. What are you doing, tell me, silent moon? Aren’t you tired of plying the eternal byways? The shepherd’s life is like your life. He rises at first light and moves his flock across the field. Then, weary, he rests at evening and hopes for nothing more. What good is the shepherd’s life to him or yours to you? Tell me, the shepherd muses, said Florita Almada in a transported voice, where is it heading, my brief wandering, your immortal journey? Man is born into pain, and being born itself means risking death, said the poem. And also: But why bring to light, why educate someone we’ll console for living later? And also: If life is misery, why do we endure it? And also: This, unblemished moon, is the mortal condition. But you’re not mortal, and what I say may matter little to you. And also, and on the contrary: You, eternal solitary wanderer, you who are so pensive, it may be you understand this life on earth, what our suffering and sighing is, what this death is, this last paling of the face, and leaving Earth behind, abandoning all familiar, loving company. What does this enormous solitude portend? And what am I? And also: This is what I know and feel: that from the eternal motions, from my fragile being, others may derive some good or happiness. And also: But life for me is wrong. And also: Old, white haired, weak, barefoot, bearing an enormous burden, up mountain and down valley, over sharp rocks, across deep sands and bracken, through wind and storm, when it’s hot and later when it freezes, running on, running faster, no rest or relief, battered and bloody, at last coming to where the way and all effort has led: terrible, immense abyss into which, upon falling, all is forgotten. And also: This, O virgin moon, is human life. And also: O resting flock, who don’t, I think, know your own misery! How I envy you! Not just because you travel as if trouble free and soon forget each need, each hurt, each deathly fear, but more because you’re never bored. And also: When you lie in the shade, on the grass, you’re calm and happy, and you spend the great part of the year this way and feel no boredom. And also: I sit on the grass, too, in the shade, but an anxiousness invades my mind as if a thorn is pricking me. And also: Yet I desire nothing, and till now I have no reason for complaint. And at this point, after sighing deeply, Florita Almada would say that several conclusions could be drawn: (1) that the thoughts that seize a shepherd can easily gallop away with him because it’s human nature; (2) that facing boredom head-on was an act of bravery and Benito Juárez had done it and she had done it too and both had seen terrible things in the face of boredom, things she would rather not recall; (3) that the poem, now she remembered, was about an Asian shepherd, not a Mexican shepherd, but it made no difference, since shepherds are the same everywhere; (4) that if it was true that all effort led to a vast abyss, she had two recommendations to begin with, first, not to cheat people, and, second, to treat them properly. Beyond that, there was room for discussion.

— Roberto Bolaño, 2666

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In the collied night

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say, “Behold!”
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.

— Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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Worthy of only the most refined of refrigerator doors

Deep inside, we never quite forget the needs with which we were born: to be accepted as we are, without regard to our deeds; to be loved through the medium of our body; to be enclosed in another’s arms.

— Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex
(via theweek)

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A piece of time

Just by existing, it demanded that you believed in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you. A baby was the oldest deal there was, to go on living.

— Justin Cronin, The Passage

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Nothing is more tiresome than being told what to admire

As dear old Kilvert notes, nothing is more tiresome than being told what to admire, and having things pointed at with a stick.

— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

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A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras!  Whole families
shopping at night!  Aisles full of husbands!  Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops?  What price bananas?  Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman?  The doors close in
an hour.  Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets?  The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be
lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

— Allen Ginsberg
Berkeley, 1955

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The annoyance of influence

I do not agree with Plato, but if anything could make me do so, it would be Aristotle’s arguments against him.

— Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

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The Making of a Philosophy Professor

By John Kaag
chronicle

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” What Socrates failed to tell us is that the examined one isn’t a whole lot better.

So he wasn’t the wisest of all men. Or if he was, he was a patronizing jerk. When I grew up, I thought to myself, I wouldn’t be a patronizing jerk. I’d tell people straightforwardly, without irony or obfuscation, what a pathetic ruse life was. I’d tell them that living was a euphemism for dying slowly, that life was an incurable disease that was ultimately fatal. So what if I was only 12?

This is what happens when your older brother, home from university, leaves his copy of Plato’s Apology on the back of the toilet. He goes on to become the doctor that he’s supposed to. And you become a philosophy professor.

I’m sure that I wasn’t alone in my understanding of life’s meaninglessness, but I remember being surprised that more kids didn’t seem affected by it. Maybe they, like Socrates, just didn’t want to talk about it. Did they not experience the monotony of class and lunch, class and lunch, day after day? Did they not experience recess as a sadistic lie? Sadistic because it was either too painful or too short (you pick), and a lie because it was meant to provide some respite from the monotony. If they did, they weren’t saying.

I sort of hoped that was the case. I hoped that my classmates silently worried about the bus crashing, or about getting hit by it, or about the monosodium glutamate in their ham sandwich, or about the pig that went into making the ham.

I did.

Bedtime involved an extended ritual that had to be performed with extreme care—a type of penance for the pig and everything else I felt guilty about. Exactly six—not five or seven—trips to the bathroom had to be made. Three ice cubes had to be placed into one glass of water, which was placed on one white washcloth on the right bedside table. One set of eyeglasses had to be set on that table and pointed toward the door. And that door had to be propped open exactly two inches (the width of my 12-year-old hand). That measurement had to be checked at least twice, although one was allowed to check more often, depending on what he had eaten for lunch.

I hoped that this ritual would somehow keep my universe intact. That hope, on most nights, let me get some sleep.

Let me be clear: I had a very pleasant childhood. My anxiety did not have any particular cause, which amounts to saying that it was true anxiety. Sure, my father drank too much (I am not divulging any secret here) and was generally negligent (again, not a secret), but he left when I was 3. So let’s not blame him. That would be too easy. Even at 12, I knew that no discrete situation could warrant the fear and trembling of my bedtime ritual.

My mother, like any good mother (she was great, by the way), was worried. Indeed, she worried about me almost as much as I did. She worried that my monkey mind and nighttime prowling would leave me tired the next day, and that if I was tired, I wouldn’t be able to make friends, and that if I didn’t make friends, I’d get depressed, and that if I got depressed, I’d lose interest in school, and that if I lost interest in school, I’d never get a job, and that if I didn’t get a job, then I couldn’t have a family, and that if I didn’t have a family, I’d be miserable.

At least her worries were reasonable.

And so she was terrified when I announced—at the age of 15—that I was going into philosophy. She knew me well enough to take me seriously, and philosophy well enough to know that it would not ease my mind. As usual, she was right.

Graduate school taught me two things. First, it taught me that I had been justified in feeling bad about that pig. (Thanks, Peter Singer.) Ham sandwiches would henceforth be placed on a long list of things that merited guilt and penance. Second, it taught me that I could do nothing about the suffering of the world; one could neither adequately atone for one’s existence nor make a meaningful attempt to escape it.

Unless you consider Camus, of course.

“There is but one truly serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” If the answer to that question seems obvious to you, you’re lucky: You’re not a philosopher. Camus postulates only two possible answers, neither of which is much fun. He takes as a given that we live in a world that is completely indifferent to our human purposes.

For a long time, I was inclined to answer Camus in the negative: Life in a meaningless world was not worth living. But I realized that such a conviction would have pesky consequences. Answering in the affirmative was no walk in the park, either. It meant that you affirmed that life was an incurable disease, but that you had decided, resolutely and freely, to suffer through it.

Resolutely and freely. As a rule, philosophers are not dauntless. They talk a big game but are generally too worried about screwing up to actually do much of anything. Deciding to act resolutely and freely, therefore, is probably the least philosophical thing I’ve ever done. No, that isn’t quite true. Acting resolutely and freely is the least philosophical thing I’ve ever done.

So I stopped eating ham sandwiches. Maybe becoming a vegetarian doesn’t seem that significant to you, but it turns out that a little resolve can go a long way.

It also turns out that ham sandwiches come in many forms—living in an unhappy marriage; the desperate attempts to meet the expectations of friends, family, and colleagues; the impossibility of meeting your own. Of course, sometimes a ham sandwich is just a ham sandwich.

In any event, I stopped eating all of them.

When anxiety leaves you, or you decide to leave it, it’s very much like losing a certain kind of old friend—one whom you have come to hate. You still remember it in vivid detail, how it humiliated you, how it kept you up at night, how it wasted your time. But now it is gone. And suddenly you’re well rested, and you have lots of time.

My mother was right. She told me long ago that if I got enough sleep, I could make friends, and if I had friends, I wouldn’t be so depressed, and if I wasn’t so depressed, I’d do better in school, and if I did better in school, I’d get a good job, and if I had a good job, I could have a happy family, and if I had a happy family, I wouldn’t be miserable.

But here’s the thing about not being miserable.

Life is still a pathetic ruse: either too painful or too short. You pick.