I am passionate about the subject of suicide because I have lived with suicidal thinking all of my life, have made multiple suicide attempts, have lost loved ones to suicide, and have so many new friends who are survivors of suicide attempts. I am a philosophy professor and writer who spends a lot of his time thinking about the meaning of life, and reading other philosophers, writers, and thinkers who have taught us about the meaning of life. I think the Buddha is especially smart and helpful on this question, as are the existentialist philosophers.
I wrote
How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind
If you only read one book by Dostoevsky, this should be the one. The psychiatrist who directed the Mayo Clinic’s mental health division for years often had his patients read all of Dostoevsky’s works.
The Idiot is about a truly innocent and good man, Prince Myshkin, who is thrust into the highest levels of Russian aristocratic society. Although he understands that deception is essential to thrive in this world, he refuses to give up his guilelessness.
He is always as honest as he can be with everyone around him, and as kind as he can be, and as caring as he can be (he is a Christ figure, also a child figure). This all turns out very badly, unsurprisingly, and results in heartbreak and murder.
There is no greater novel ever written for teaching us about the human capacity and need for human love, and the many obstacles we have for accepting it.
Translated by Constance Garnett, with an Introduction and Notes by Agnes Cardinal, Honorary Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent.
Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from an asylum in Switzerland. As he becomes embroiled in the frantic amatory and financial intrigues which centre around a cast of brilliantly realised characters and which ultimately lead to tragedy, he emerges as a unique combination of the Christian ideal of perfection and Dostoevsky's own views, afflictions and manners. His serene selflessness is contrasted with the worldly qualities of every other character in the novel. Dostoevsky supplies a harsh indictment of…
Basho tells of a long journey he takes across Japan with a friend of his, and they write poetry along the way.
The poetry is included in the memoir. Basho writes completely without judgment, accepting everything he experiences exactly as it is. It is a book that show us how to try to find openness, naturalness, goodness, and (really) the fundamental perfection of everything.
'It was with awe That I beheld Fresh leaves, green leaves, Bright in the sun'
When the Japanese haiku master Basho composed The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he was an ardent student of Zen Buddhism, setting off on a series of travels designed to strip away the trappings of the material world and bring spiritual enlightenment. He writes of the seasons changing, the smell of the rain, the brightness of the moon and the beauty of the waterfall, through which he sensed the mysteries of the universe. These writings not only chronicle Basho's travels, but they also capture…
These essays are the ultimate guide to human intimacy. If you believe, as I do, that the best way to find meaning in life is to establish connections with others, you must read this book.
Rich teaches us that we are all clumsy, needy, fearful communicators, and shows us how what we perceive as failings are actually the secret keys to opening up whole invisible worlds of understanding between each other. She understands the art of gentleness as well as anyone who has ever written.
At issue are the politics of language; the uses of scholarship; and the topics of racism, history, and motherhood among others called forth by Rich as "part of the effort to define a female consciousness which is political, aesthetic, and erotic, and which refuses to be included or contained in the culture of passivity."
Look, you’re often going to feel like life is meaningless. Maybe you’re right. But don’t give up.
Like Quixote, you have the power of your noble heart, and the wealth of your imagination. But you also have your Sancho Paza, to keep you moving practically forward. It all will likely come to a ridiculous end. But that’s okay, so long as you’re laughing at yourself along the way.
It is funny. We’re allowed to be funny. We’re supposed to laugh at ourselves and at each other.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HAROLD BLOOM. Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read Don Quixote.
The moral outrage of Audre Lorde is always directed at making the world a better place.
That is her great genius: she can see everything that is wrong, and knows how to awaken in each of us the desire to make things better. She also understands that every revolution begins with a single human being deciding that she, he or they can be a better person and help to make a better world.
Her spirituality is like the ocean: magnificent, scary, greater than us. She’s also perhaps the most important poet of the twentieth century and for the twenty-first century, so she’s just indispensable reading. Absolutely required.
If you haven’t already spent time with her work, you should read “Power” on the Poetry Foundation website today, before you look at any of the books I list above. It will take three minutes and may well change your view of poetry forever.
"These are poems which blaze and pulse on the page."-Adrienne Rich "The first declaration of a black, lesbian feminist identity took place in these poems, and set the terms-beautifully, forcefully-for contemporary multicultural and pluralist debate."-Publishers Weekly "This is an amazing collection of poetry by . . . one of our best contemporary poets. . . . Her poems are powerful, often political, always lyrical and profoundly moving."-Chuckanut Reader Magazine "What a deep pleasure to encounter Audre Lorde's most potent genius . . . you will welcome the sheer accessibility and the force and beauty of this volume."-Out Magazine
From the acclaimed author of How to Sell—and based on his viral Huffington Post article—comes a deeply intimate and insightful of the suicidal mind, combining the author’s personal experience with a philosophical, literary, and journalistic inquiry into the subject. It is a work that powerfully gives voice to what to many has long been incomprehensible, while showing those presently struggling with suicidal thoughts that they are not alone, and that the desire to kill oneself—like other self-destructive desires—is almost always temporary and avoidable. Martin is a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up the East Face without the use of supplemental oxygen, Sherpa support, or chance for rescue. When three climbers disappear during their summit attempt, Zieman reaches the knife edge of her limits and digs deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.
The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, which had only been successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first large team, Mimi Zieman and her team would climb without using supplemental oxygen or porter support. While the unpredictable weather and high altitude of 29,035 feet make climbing Everest perilous in any condition, attempting a new route, with no idea of what obstacles lay ahead, was especially audacious. Team members were expected to push themselves to their…
