This is not entirely a book about suicide is it?

It's bigger than that isn't it? About more than that right?

This morning I am reading the New York Times - scooped with permission from the porch of Pinot Paul who is no doubt spending Easter Sunday at his bourgeois canadiancottage - and on the front page is a story about the recent suicide of Sylvia Plath's son.

Interesting little piece. Sad story. One of the ideas you're left with of course is that suicide is hereditary.

Not a new idea I suppose.

An idea I have is that suicide sometimes comes out of intensity, out of the "too much" or the "flame that burned too brightly" category.

Sylvia's writing had it. Apparently her intellectual son had it - though he seemed to devote his whole life to avoiding his mother's story and the world of literature all together.

Intensity. Yep. Not a bad theory. Intensity - Incandescence.

In the DFW magnum opus, the head of the Incandenza family and the founder of an entire tennis academy puts his head into a microwave and puts and end to the incandescence by using incandescence.

And yet DFW used a belt.

Interestingly just what Sylvia Plath's son promised to use. He always said to his friends that if he ever did it he would do it in his work shop.

That's where they found him - hanging from the ceiling.

DFW was also found in his work space.

Hmm.

What does it mean?

Probably nothing.

Because I know that this wonderful, witty, incandescent (and thick) book is bigger than suicide, just like Sylvia Plath's writing was bigger than her death - right?

(Known primarily for her poetry, Plath also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The book's protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is a bright (INCANDESCENT?), ambitious student at Smith College who begins to experience a mental breakdown while interning for a fashion magazine in New York. The plot parallels Plath's experience interning at Mademoiselle magazine and subsequent mental breakdown and suicide attempt. (Wikipedia))