Suicide is empathy.

A rhesus monkey is rewarded with food if it pulls a chain. The chain, however, is connected with a device that shocks another rhesus monkey in an adjoining cage. Because the first monkey was able to recognize the suffering of the second, and the reason for the suffering, it refrained from pulling the chain. One participant stopped pulling the chain, and thus stopped eating, for five days. Another for twelve days.

Preston and de Waal write: “These monkeys were literally starving themselves to prevent the shock to the conspecific.”

< § >

—
Preston and de Waal, “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases,” Behavioral & Brain Sciences 25, no. 1 (2002).

—

Mr. Edwards offers another lesson that he tried to learn himself. The lesson, says Mr. Edwards, came from a Black Crow warrior. He was quite the fellow, Edwards tells Charles Ingalls, played by Mr. Michael Landon, who also played an angel named Jonathan Smith in the television series Highway to Heaven, with Mr. Edwards co-starring as the mortal sidekick, the Tattoo to Mr. Roarke if you will, although Roarke always wore white suits of the most immaculate tailoring while Jonathan wore just an insane amount of denim.

There is another difference between Fantasy Island and Highway to Heaven. Jonathan is simply the guardian angel for good folks in the face of bad people and dire straights. He tries to level this cruel world with angelic compassion and intervention. Mr. Roarke, by contrast, teaches and even punishes by granting what you wish for so you can see what you truly get. He tilts what seemed level and now you learn just how askew you were to begin.

Dead now, says Mr. Edwards of the Black Crow warrior. When it was time he just took off. Went to the woods to die.

Why did he do that?, asks Charles.

Because he couldn’t hunt no more, answers Edwards.

Where then was this man’s Carnegie Hall? In the mountains far away, is the answer. One man needed a packed hall and posterity to perform and to play for the crowd. The other required solitude. One couldn’t stop talking even as he drifted off. The other slipped away in the key of silence leaving only the slightest trace.

And so the joke goes, how do you get to Carnegie Hall, where Carnegie Hall is suicide? The answer, chuckle, is practicing to perform being at home with yourself wherever that might be.