What goes into a good suicide note? Is it preferable to be succinct...

This isn't quite answering OP's question but it's definitely related.

There's a German critic called Michael Hofmann who was famous for writing really harsh reviews.

The harshest of all was his review of the last-known work of Stefan Zweig.

Hofmann said this work was "boring" and that Zweig's heart was clearly "not in it".

The work? You guessed it - Zweig's suicide note.

This thread was made to discuss the suicide note as a literary genre, not to be a blog post

Wow.

DFW SUICIDE NOTE RELEASE WHEN?

Most suicide notes are characterized by very dry and objective writing.

Virginia Woolf's suicide note is pretty straightforward and to the point. She thanks her husband for his support but fears going through another bout of deep depression and she states it's better for her to die than to suffer more.

>TFW OP's response is surprisingly based

Is it appropriate therefore to assume that writing drawn-out or even poetic notes is uncommon (and probably in poor taste)?
I suppose taking liberties with the note and fleshing it out may come across as masturbatory and somewhat cruel for the family
I'm personally more of the opinion that a longer note may provide some closure for the loved ones

It's the fact that most suicidal people are depressed and depression makes you write in a certain way. Write whatever you want. It's your suicide note.

is there any writing about depression's effect on writing?

it´s a sign of faggotry, even a poet shouldn´t leave a fucking suicide note, a poet should write until the day he dies, but not a fucking suicide note. Ever.

how a suicide note should be a literary genre?
it´s like making a literary genre out of stuff you wrote on winter or January or before 5:00 pm, i see it an arbitrary criteria.

Take a moment to appreciate the fact that you've never encountered pain.

It has its own conventions, just like a novel, short story, email, literary paper or cover letter.

I'd say it's cruel to leave anything more than your justifications and your apologies. Suicide is an inherently selfish act (I won't say it's positive or negative though) so pages and pages of a note would be masturbatory and hurtful to friends and family. Plus, depending on someone's mental state it can be confusing, disorienting, and self conflicting.
Depression limits brain activity so writing is much more Spartan and matter of fact rather than flowing or creative.

Mitchell Heisman's suicide note was almost 2000 pages long.

>Depression limits brain activity so writing is much more Spartan and matter of fact rather than flowing or creative.
would this make activities like mathematics and logic easier or harder when you're depressed (obviously discounting that everything is harder when you're depressed)?

No, I think he's trapped in the trenches, but if he'd been written him as a fictional character he would be considered as the Patrick Bateman of his times.

Yeah, most any mental activity is dampened by depression. Focusing, abstract thinking, communication, empathy, simple tasks, interpretation, motivation, etc. You can see here how dramatic the difference is.
mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/pet-scan/multimedia/-pet-scan-of-the-brain-for-depression/img-20007400

Sorry I meant to say I mostly agree, but it's not a display of genius because he clearly can't see himself from outside of himself, he can't step away and congratulate himself on his insights into the human condition, he's just burrowed in like a bug.

So if someone else wrote him, yeah.

>Suicide is an inherently selfish act
Surely if a person is in so much pain that they're considering taking their own life it's more selfish to expect this person to continue existing for the sake of others?
I have never understood why people see it as selfish.

Are you suggesting that selfish acts are generally unjustifiable?

That's why I didn't say it was positive or negative selfishness. It's selfish because it's a decision completely by and for yourself about your own life and destiny. I agree that suicide is sometimes preferable than continuing to live but no action happens in a vacuum. I'm not one of those people who think it's selfish because "you're taking yourself away from loved ones who can help you" but that it's again a choice that you as an individual make.

I can see the reviews now. "A Notes From Underground for the 21st Century." I always thought that My Twisted World's opening lines ("Humanity....all my suffering has been at the hands of humanity, particularly women") was sheer kino. Hilarious and pathetic.

He's such an interesting case to me. Like, he wasn't bad looking, just a massive sperg. I think if he had a positive romantic relationship with a woman he probably would have discarded her for being beneath him or not fulfilling his ideas of a relationship. If he didn't become fixated on the idea of sex validating him and had a more step-by-step approach than some porno "a woman will approach me, tell me how great I am, and then bang me" idea of building a relationship he could have made it tbqh

I think it's clear he valued women almost entirely based on their value as a status object. He was way too deep in the Hollywood psychosis rabbit hole

His fathers background in Hollywood is the most interesting part that was completely overlooked at the time. Especially now that we have all this Weinstein stuff confirmed
I think the industry was leaking into his head since birth

Just let it ALL out. Everything. It should completely unfiltered, unexpurgated, and uncensored so that it leaves no ambiguity of yourself politically, philosophically, religiously, and on your relationships. Your final memoir shall be a terrifyingly open book about yourself, containing mostly details nobody wants to know than they want to know, like Eliot Roger's My Twisted World.

Are there any examples of this besides Elliot Rodger?

Terrorist manifestos?

Any from authors or poets? Artists in general?

Well artists generally don't write terrorist manifestos but the Unibomber Manifesto is the closest thing I can think of.

I don't know, I haven't read anything as brutally honest as MTW. My point is, if you are killing yourself, you should be completely honest, and you won't have another opportunity to do so once you're dead. The people you loved and hated deserve to know the real you. They deserve to know it all, even all the fucked up porn you've watched and fapped to over the years, but on the bright side, you get the last word. Every single loose end must be tied, no matter how small it is. There shall be no doubt for any knowing of who you are once you off yourself.

If I wrote an in depth self analysis do you think anyone would read it? Would Veeky Forums read it?

Eh who gives a fuck. Most of that is just boring junk data

If you killed yourself? Probably not
I mean if its interesting its interesting

someone should write a suicide note that's actually a 90+ page thesis on suicide notes as a literary genre. you would be immortalized forever in literary history

hey guys can you help me edit this sentence into something better? posted in the other thread but it might be better here

i think right now it is both too edgy/tryhard and could have more immediate/distasteful/nauseating imagery

> im imagining laying down mouth wide open teeth grinding on the cement curb like American History X as a 30 pound sledgehammer swishes down thru the air onto the back of my head at a speed of 15+ feet per second causing my jawbone & the attached flesh to tear off like the pull tab on a teenage engineering po20 while the top of my skull bursts open like baked potato sending brain matter gushing out onto the sidewalk as a red pulp that has started smelling really bad as it lays out there sweltering for 10+ hours in the humid 98 degree farenheit august rain and has a kind of darkened, semimoist half-dried layer on the outside and the ants and flies have started getting into the crack in my skull which really pisses off the guy whose job it is to squeegee this fetid septic sludge meat grinder viscera into his bio hazard dustpan

thanks

>show dont tell
Rule #1 bucko

Reddit rule #1 more like. Terrible advice for brainlets

anguish, mostly.

look at that paragraph again and tell me with a straight face that "like American History X as a 30 pound sledgehammer swishes down thru the air onto the back of my head" is a good description of violence

It gets the job done, you have a better alternative big boy?

SUICIDE NOTE BY MITCHELL HEISMAN

how abut
> "im imagining laying down mouth open teeth grinding on the curb cement like American History X as a 30 pound sledgehammer pivots counter clock wise as it swish down thru the air and slams onto the back of my head at a velocity of 15+ feet per second causing [...]

hunter thompson's suicide note should be included in microsoft word as a template for all suicide notes.

>I'm a boring faggot

Yeah, he wrote what we were all thinking and acted appropriated on it

Is Martin Manley's sprawling blog documenting his life and the process of planning and deciding on his suicide Veeky Forums?
martin-manley.eprci.com/

My Twisted World is unironically Notes From Underground for the 21st century, it's just that in this case the underground man existed and killed a couple people

did he suicide finally?

It reminds me of the Father in the Caves from Honest Hearts

See

Yeah I'd agree, I think it's better when considered as a work of literature than as a work of philosophy.

"Imagine being curb stomped every day, for the rest of your life, but you have the power to end it."

I suppose I'll post a few famous suicide notes so we can actually start discussing it as a literary form, since OP kinda skipped out on that part. Morbid as it is, I would argue it could be defined as an exceptionally niche genre, but a literary genre nonetheless.

"All this buttoning and unbuttoning."
>18th century, author unknown

“I am now about to make the great adventure. I cannot endure this agonizing pain any longer. It is all over my body. Neither can I face the impending blindness. I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.”
>Clara Blandick, American actress

"Life is unbearable for me... Forgive me."
>Dalida, Italian singer

"Mr. Brad Delp. "J'ai une ame solitaire". I am a lonely soul."
>Brad Delp, lead singer of American rock band Boston

"To my friends: my work is done. Why wait?"
George Eastman, inventor of Kodak

"I wanted to do too much. Even though I live, I'm not really alive. I don't want anyone to be disappointed. It's nice having money... I wanted to make money."
>Lee Eun-Ju, South Korean actress

"Delicate line between heaven and earth...
The calm of the ages,
all the world’s worth.
Such minuscule measure,
while we think it so grand…
Just five specks of smallness,
This soft quiet land.
So frail and so fleeting,
in the end you will see
Simple dreams were Horatio’s philosophy.

For all the truth,
all creation,
all secrets of yore
Can be told in an instant,
by then they’re no more.

Ah, The Unexplainable
All worries unsettled,
heartache unresolved…
All questions unanswered,
with death, shall be solved.

We already teeter,
this sheer cliff so high.
When we fall to corruption,
insecurities die.

To end is to start;
to surrender is to know.

Despair and depression,
together they grow.
Hope shall meet hopeless
when there’s nowhere to go."
>Misao Fujimura, a Japanese philosophy student, after being rejected by a woman he loved. He carved the poem directly into a tree before killing himself, a fact I only include because I think medium should be considered when discussing genre.

"Things just seemed to go too wrong too many times."
>Tony Hancock, English actor/comedian

"Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck."
George Sanders, English actor/singer/composer/author

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your (old) age. Relax — This won't hurt."
>Hunter S Thompson, American journalist and author

"Goodbye, my friend, goodbye
My love, you are in my heart.
It was preordained we should part
And be reunited by and by.
Goodbye: no handshake to endure.
Let's have no sadness -- furrowed brow.
There's nothing new in dying now
Though living is no newer."
>Sergei Esenin, Russian poet. Written in his own blood.

"All fled - all done, so lift me on the pyre;
The feast is over, and the lamps expire."
>Robert E Howard, American writer

"I cannot die without, contented and serene as I am, reconciling myself with all the world - before all others - with you, my dearest Ulrike. Give up the strong expressions which you resorted to in your letter to me: let me revoke them; truly, to save me, you have done all within the strength, not only of a sister, but of a man - all that could be done. The truth is, nothing on earth can help me. And now good-bye: may Heaven send you a death even half equal to mine in joy and unutterable bliss: that is the most heart-felt and profoundest wish that I can think of for you. Your Henry. Stimmung, at Potsdam, on the morning of my death."
>Heinrich von Kleist, German dramatist and composer

"The future is just old age and illness and pain... I must have peace and this is the only way."
>James Whale, English film director

"Dearest, I feel certain that I'm 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 to be 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 until 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 in 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 you life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V."
>Virginia Woolf, English author

"What Cato did, and Addison approved, cannot be wrong."
>Eustace Budgell, English writer

"I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity."
>Jerzy Kosinski, Polish-American novelist

Kosinski's is the best

>Kosinski's
he's a good author, althogh he's been accused of having had his books ghostwritten. didn't realize he had committed suicide.

You might want to read some of the poetry of AE Housman, some of his poems are like suicide notes.E.g.:

IF it chance your eye offend you,
Pluck it out, lad, and be sound:
’Twill hurt, but here are salves to friend you,
And many a balsam grows on ground.

And if your hand or foot offend you, 5
Cut it off, lad, and be whole;
But play the man, stand up and end you,
When your sickness is your soul.

>It's selfish because it's a decision completely by and for yourself about your own life and destiny.
i don't see a problem here

...

Here's mine *ahem*

For sale: micro condoms
Never worn

Robert E. Howards note:
>All fled, all done, so lift me on the pyre;
>The feast is over and the lamps expire.

I started reading and I basically agree with everything so far.
I admire his conviction to his beliefs.

>Auchwitz disproves what Marx said because Nazis didn't use Jews for labor
>The west should thank Jews for morality, the Jews are the foundation of western thought, not greeks or romans

It might be a nice readfor you if you think the world revolves around jewishness

I haven't got up to that point yet.
Mostly he's just been talking about life as a biological instinct and how humanity has overcome almost all our other biological instincts

>Auchwitz disproves what Marx said because Nazis didn't use Jews for labor

But they did...

Okay yeah this guy is cracked

He is correct though. The Jews play a far more significant (and subversive, though productive) role in Western civilization's history than is commonly attributed to them. Christianity was not a rebellion of Judaism but simply a radicalization of it, and the entire enterprise is what shaped the West in order to eventually create the practice that we now call science. I'm not antisemitic though, and neither was Heisman nor Nietzsche when they pointed this out.

There can really be no question that Heisman is the most Veeky Forums suicide note. His analysis might run a bit wild and speculative at points but doesn't exclude him from keen, interesting observations like the English Sonderweg, and he also arrives at points that are totally uncontroversial and in tune with regular scholarly work, like 'Marxism could thus be interpreted as a “secularization”
of a Biblically based, messianic Weltanschauung. The issue behind secularization concerns the origin of “modern” values'.
If I make it big in academia or publishing I'll make it my goal that he sees a larger audience. I also always though it was a shame he didn't have a proper editor to proof-read etc. so that the final work could've been spared from small errors like 'Karl Marx was understandably obsessed (sic) this central
contradiction of capitalist liberal democracy: formal human equality and capitalist inequality'

thought*

I think it worth noting for this discussion that budgell had a line break after 'approved' and before 'cannot'. Given his historical/literary positions I always thought it was the first gesture towards some (unfinished) pentameter epigram - perhaps couplets, perhaps blank verse.

It's cuter than it is edgy

It isn't worth it. Particularly if you've already read the best parts. At the risk of sounding like a fag, don't be afraid to ask for help if you need it. Remember, you're part of a community and we love you in an abstract way.

>At the risk of sounding like a fag
Why the homophobia?

Because for the past week I've fapped almost exclusively to traps.
Even reverse traps don't do anything for me anymore.

>Asking Veeky Forums to help with depression
Could be the most preposterous thing I've heard all week. Then again, it's only Tuesday.

2000 pages of tenis and death

He really killed himself because of the editing

...

I actually think about that scene a lot, honestly.

depends on the goal. if the goal is to make the family feel better then just keep it short since you're going to fail at making them feel better anyway.

if you're wanting to get noticed by the news/world, you gotta write something long and crazy, kinda like

New here?

People will actually defend this as being a work of philosophical genius and not a crackpot work of a suicidal wealthy ashkenazi jew.
Nice wm btw.

I think the meme arrows were meant to imply that it was a wrong idea presented in the text.

Been here altogether too long

kek

sad anger, brevity, poetic diction and a sense of incompleteness, as if one had more to say than they really do or maybe that many of these things could've been said but only had the circumstances turned out differently. So, this way the loved ones know, they took something with them, this can't be recovered, no one will piece together the real grievances or fears which consumed this life. Beauty which silences the minds of those who encounter it. I'm sorry you feel this way user, please consider that there is no afterlife, your death would be painful, its very rare that its not excruciating and you may not succeed and could be forced to subsist in a mutilated or medicated state for some time with your basic dignity taken from you. There is no chance I can prevent you or anyone else from doing this deed, but I implore you to contemplate existence, to ask yourself if you can be a part of it willingly and to make amends with your own feelings of guilt, to forgive yourself. Good luck nigger

If any of you are thinking of suicide, know that OP's pic is but one photo in a shoot that contains the lovely lady's naked tatas on full display. If you must self harm, let it be by giving yourself friction burns.