Word: koestler
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There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: the nightmare of a botched attempt to end it." So Arthur Koestler wrote in his 1981 preface to A Guide to Self-Deliverance, a suicide manual distributed to the 8,000 members of the British Voluntary Euthanasia Society. When the famed 77-year-old writer (Darkness at Noon), who suffered from Parkinson's disease, decided two weeks ago that his life was intolerable, he reportedly swallowed the finely calibrated dose of drugs prescribed by the society. Sharing the fatal potion was his wife Cynthia...
...Koestler have a moral obligation to dissuade his apparently healthy wife from ending her life? Are organizations like the Voluntary Euthanasia Society encouraging suicide by presenting the act as dignified, respectable, even attractive? Koestler's effusion in the how-to book for which he wrote the preface was characteristic of the movement's publications: "The prospect of falling peacefully, blissfully asleep is not only soothing but can make it positively desirable to quit this pain-racked mortal frame...
Though the notes the couple left behind to explain their action have not yet been made public, close friends in Britain believe Koestler was the dominant partner. Said one physician who knew the couple well: "My guess is that she did not take a leading role but that Koestler said, 'The time has come.' " U.S. Psychiatrist Herbert Hendin, author of a 1982 study, Suicide in America, points out that in suicide-pact cases he has studied, a common factor is coercion, usually by the man. Says Hendin: "There is a tendency for suicidal people to say that what...
...suicide guide that Koestler promoted, like other how-to suicide manuals published in the U.S., Scotland and The Netherlands, was designed only for the use of hopelessly sick people, with the express purpose of reducing, as the British guide puts it, "the incidence of unsuccessful attempts." A Guide to Self-Deliverance is heart-wrenching reading. The manual stresses that suicide should be a last resort for those in intractable pain. It then offers the exact doses of drugs that will ensure death. The manual recommends that the drugs be used in combination with other methods, such as plastic garbage bags...
...late 1970s, Koestler postulated that death does not signify total extinction. "It means merging into the cosmic consciousness," he wrote in an essay on life after death, comparing the process of dying to "the flow of a river into the ocean." Summoning the rhetorical powers of his youth, the elderly writer foresaw the end. The river, he wrote, "has been freed of the mud-that clung to it, and regained its transparency. It has become identified with the sea, spread over it, omnipresent, every drop catching a spark of the sun. The curtain has not fallen; it has been raised...