solitary flight

§10 Suicide must be punished

Suicide is criminal. Suicides must be punished.

In 1257, a “Parisian jumped into the river Seine. When he was rescued, he took communion before he died. His family claimed the body, arguing that he had died in a state of grace, but because he had attempted suicide and had been in his right mind, as shown by his repentance, the court sentenced his corpse to torture.”

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Minois, History, 7.


One story of this story of the human condition is the story of storywriting on the nature and destiny, design and defect of human hunger as words whose ultimate meaning is meant to shape the world as it should be in hungering as human life, individual and society, society and species.

Stories span fields and genres and collectively if loosely they comprise the literature on the human condition toward a truly better tomorrow. The shared acknowledgement is that the human condition by way of human hunger is in some way, partly or entirely, horrific and that something must be done. The common hunger among all storywriters is to write a better and truer story with words that will shape and reshape the world. From there the stories proceed everywhichway, individual and society, society and species.

Each story deals with its own version of what human hungers truly matter on the question of the human condition. Each story has its own mix of origins and aims, causes and effects, roles and authorities, methods and mechanics, scope and coordinates in space and over time. Stories vary in their particular emphases on surviving or thriving or propagating and the ways each might relate to the others. Each story selects its own focus on the human being as individual or society — where society means anything from family and tribe to religion or class, nation and state, civilization and so on — and even the entire species, and stories often work out the interplay between any and all of these.

And so the task of each of these stories is simply to rectify the human condition by solving its problemizing of human hunger so that ultimately and even inevitably and hopefully perfectly human life survives and thrives and propagates, individual and society, society and species as the new and enduring human condition in a better tomorrow.

The End.