The Illicit Happiness Of Other People

The circumstances of the world shift without explanation or warning. Why do some of us meet difficulty with despair and others do so with fortitude? Who can comfort us when we are scared? Whom do we gather around us when darkness descends and the trees fall? What if a tragedy in a person’s life cannot be so plainly seen by others? What if it cannot

Knew I’d never see my twenty-fifth birthday. Am early for once. The lovelorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, like amateur conductors. A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, “Suicide is selfishness.” Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and c

Why mortals bloomed like flowers and crumbled to nothing? Why their absence left a gnawing ache, a hollow void that could never be filled? And how everything they once were, that spark within them, could be extinguished so completely yet the world did not collapse under the weight of so much pain and grief.’

voluntarily, when there was absolutely no kind of geographical loyalty involved, was an act of such utter pointlessness that I felt rather in awe of Nick. I had been reading about existentialism; here was someone living it, someone who accepted the concept of an act of Free Will in a Meaningless Universe, and was taking it to a new level. Given Nic