I remember stumbling upon this man's story during a hard time in my life.
I understand.
I'm more sympathetic towards assisted suicide now.
It's mercy.
> My personality was something I spent years creating. Along with my mind and body, it was part of my life’s work. It’s true that I accomplished a good number of things, but my greatest accomplishment was myself. It was the thing I put all of my heart into and wanted to share with the world and now it’s imprisoned inside of me. When people tell me I just have to find a different way to express it, I want to SCREAM!! Do you know Joseph Merrick, the “elephant man”? One of his doctors said the saddest thing about him was that he could not form expressions with his face. He could not smile. I expressed myself with my body! I showed joy with my body! I was a fighter and a wrestler, a streaker and skinny-dipper. I was a runner, a jumper, an expert weight-lifter, and yoga master! An adventurer! A thrower of axes and a hefter of logs. A fisherman who wrangled with sharks and octopi. A wearer of giant pumpkins! I was so much fun! A hearty embracer of friends. A climber of trees and of mountains. I loved to throw big rocks! To dig and build and move heavy things around. I was so strong! I loved to play with children! I would catch my cousins in my arms, all three at once, and run them in circles, or bear them proudly around on my shoulders.
> I am Horowitz with no fingers. Phiddipides with no legs, Shakespeare with no pen. Michelangelo with no chisel or paintbrush. I am not what I am.
What an ego. Hard to be sympathetic when a person’s writing is so heavily suffused with their absolute love of their self and little else (the first section basically amounts to “I don’t believe in morality but for unknown reasons think I’m the shit and have valuable
Philosophical opinions and can write an ecce homo style piece with next to nothing to justify it), the author does not sound at all like a “truth teller” rather like an egoist. I don’t feel bad for ”Clayton Atreus” I could hardly make it through the first section of this scrap. I don’t give a damn that you’re familiar with the canon of western literature, many people are. He mentions Dostoyevsky-he is a total Luzhin. Sorry. I welcome the downvotes. I do think it’s important that we have authentic writing about the experiences of disability, but I think a long preamble that makes you absolutely pretentious, egotistical, and pompous in the eyes of readers is the wrong way to go about it.
He was certainly a person with some flaws. It seems to me like he took up philosophy to retroactively justify, mostly to himself, the way he was already living his life.
Another part that I found especially unpleasant was how, in the chapter about sexuality, he seamlessly transitioned from his sexual attraction to women to how much he enjoyed beating up other men. He made it quite clear that the two things were different sides of the same coin to him.
His accident followed a similar pattern. On the motorcycle forums where he was posting pictures of his trip as it happened, there were lots of comments politely begging him to wear more protective equipment. He acknowledged then but politely refused.
Ultimately, I still sympathised with him. He didn't do himself any favours, and I probably wouldn't have wanted to know him personally, but he didn't deserve the level of torture he ended up enduring.
I can't imagine how I would handle such an awful ordeal as his, but I do think his ego and his finding the value of his life entirely in his own limited sense of potential worldly accomplishments only made his suffering all the worse. I found his attitude to be even demonic at times. I cannot pass judgment on the guy himself, but the attitude portrayed in the writing is very spiritually warped and dark.
Agreed, it's like he thinks being paralyzed instantly makes him interesting.
Theres a lack of concrete details but it seems like he was a privileged, callow, entitled, thoughtless man before the accident, and nothing really changed.
"Everything I had wanted for years was right in front of me. I was going to get my J.D. and a Ph.D. in philosophy. My plan was, among other things, to be a philosophy professor for at least a while. I believed I had a special gift and could be not only a good professor, but an absolutely wonderful one. But I also needed adventure and the law degree would give me the ability to easily get fun and exciting jobs all over the world. On the weekends I would climb mountains and jump and play in the ocean. I would take months off at a time- travel, adventure, girls, fun, rowdiness, freedom! Sounding my barbaric YAWP across the rooftops of the world!"
Based on that I'm assuming this guy comes from wealth?
This is one of those things I stumbled upon and couldn't stop reading until I finished. As weird as it is to say this on a link aggregation site I highly recommend setting this aside for later instead of just looking at it now (it'd probably be ~250 pages if it were a typical paperback for time reference).
I don't have time to re-read this, so I may be misremembering the details, but my impression as I recall at the time was that this guy was depressed and wrote this book to justify his suicide - to 'prove' it was the correct course of action for someone in his position. (Yes he acknowledges other people can manage to live as a quadriplegic, but not him, because he had a far more active life before the accident than any of them.)
The problems with his argument:
* While it's true a spinal cord cannot be repaired, he never engaged with rehabilitation to improve his situation at all.
* His main problem was depression. He assumed it was caused by the accident, and so didn't bother to treat it. But millions of physically healthy people suffer from depression and kill themselves too. And some very disabled people don't suffer from depression.
I was left thinking that while it may be nothing would have helped, we just don't know. His friends, family and doctors let him down by not forcing him to undergo rehabilitation and psychotherapy.
> "forcing him to undergo rehabilitation and psychotherapy."
...
this, this is your definition of life?
You also seem to have absolutely zero respect for his definition and meaning of life.
I really hope we're far, far away from companies being able to force us to undergo "rehabilitation and psychotherapy" so we're not "depressed" and are happy to work all day making them money. With thoughts like yours though, I feel we may be closer than I'd ever like to think.
It's mostly the very uncut reality of the suffering of many human beings who are legally denied any dignified methods of peacefully leaving our world.
Reading this shouldn't make you depressed, it should make you pissed as hell that medical science has been held back for decades now because of religious bullshit, and also give you some motivation to call your lawmakers and demand they legalize doctor assisted suicide/euthanasia (unless you live in some of the few places that offer it), in a style that isn't completely restricted from the actual individuals choice & dependent on the whims of caregivers or legal guardians who aren't the one actually living in a torturous hell on Earth.
> All I can hope for is to become happy with a life that now tortures me. One that cages me, pens me in, puts up walls all around me. One that makes me smaller, misshapen, that boxes my heart and spirit inside of me. But that’s no hope at all, no challenge at all. As if one could say, “You will be enslaved from now on with no chance of escape. Your owner will use your wife and daughters as he pleases, for his pleasure. If you do not work you will be whipped and tortured and it will be the same for your family. Your hope in life, and your challenge, is to become happy with this.”
I understand.
I'm more sympathetic towards assisted suicide now.
It's mercy.
> My personality was something I spent years creating. Along with my mind and body, it was part of my life’s work. It’s true that I accomplished a good number of things, but my greatest accomplishment was myself. It was the thing I put all of my heart into and wanted to share with the world and now it’s imprisoned inside of me. When people tell me I just have to find a different way to express it, I want to SCREAM!! Do you know Joseph Merrick, the “elephant man”? One of his doctors said the saddest thing about him was that he could not form expressions with his face. He could not smile. I expressed myself with my body! I showed joy with my body! I was a fighter and a wrestler, a streaker and skinny-dipper. I was a runner, a jumper, an expert weight-lifter, and yoga master! An adventurer! A thrower of axes and a hefter of logs. A fisherman who wrangled with sharks and octopi. A wearer of giant pumpkins! I was so much fun! A hearty embracer of friends. A climber of trees and of mountains. I loved to throw big rocks! To dig and build and move heavy things around. I was so strong! I loved to play with children! I would catch my cousins in my arms, all three at once, and run them in circles, or bear them proudly around on my shoulders.
> I am Horowitz with no fingers. Phiddipides with no legs, Shakespeare with no pen. Michelangelo with no chisel or paintbrush. I am not what I am.
Another part that I found especially unpleasant was how, in the chapter about sexuality, he seamlessly transitioned from his sexual attraction to women to how much he enjoyed beating up other men. He made it quite clear that the two things were different sides of the same coin to him.
His accident followed a similar pattern. On the motorcycle forums where he was posting pictures of his trip as it happened, there were lots of comments politely begging him to wear more protective equipment. He acknowledged then but politely refused.
Ultimately, I still sympathised with him. He didn't do himself any favours, and I probably wouldn't have wanted to know him personally, but he didn't deserve the level of torture he ended up enduring.
Based on that I'm assuming this guy comes from wealth?
The problems with his argument:
* While it's true a spinal cord cannot be repaired, he never engaged with rehabilitation to improve his situation at all.
* His main problem was depression. He assumed it was caused by the accident, and so didn't bother to treat it. But millions of physically healthy people suffer from depression and kill themselves too. And some very disabled people don't suffer from depression.
I was left thinking that while it may be nothing would have helped, we just don't know. His friends, family and doctors let him down by not forcing him to undergo rehabilitation and psychotherapy.
I hope fate never touches you so cruelly as to make you reflect on your callousness years from now.
...
this, this is your definition of life?
You also seem to have absolutely zero respect for his definition and meaning of life.
I really hope we're far, far away from companies being able to force us to undergo "rehabilitation and psychotherapy" so we're not "depressed" and are happy to work all day making them money. With thoughts like yours though, I feel we may be closer than I'd ever like to think.
And if, after forcing your trendy medical blandishments on him, if he still wanted to die, would you let him?
I don't understand why he didn't have his legs amputated if they caused him so much anguish.
Reading this shouldn't make you depressed, it should make you pissed as hell that medical science has been held back for decades now because of religious bullshit, and also give you some motivation to call your lawmakers and demand they legalize doctor assisted suicide/euthanasia (unless you live in some of the few places that offer it), in a style that isn't completely restricted from the actual individuals choice & dependent on the whims of caregivers or legal guardians who aren't the one actually living in a torturous hell on Earth.