--Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Penguin 1994, p. 1102.
http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/mondays.asp
"On 29 January 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer opened fire on children arriving at Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego from her house across the street, killing two men and wounding eight students and a police officer. Principal Burton Wragg was attempting to rescue children in the line of fire when he was shot and killed, and custodian Mike Suchar was slain attempting to aid Wragg.
Spencer used a rifle her father had given her as a gift. As to what impelled her into this form of murderous madness, she told a reporter,''I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day.''
The "Mondays" comment was not the only eyebrow-raising declaration to issue from Spencer that day. According to a report written by the police negotiators who spoke with her during the six-hour standoff, she made such comments to them as ''There was no reason for it, and it was just a lot of fun''; ''It was just like shooting ducks in a pond''; and ''[the children ] looked like a herd of cows standing around, it was really easy pickings.''"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06suicide-t.html
"The Urge to End It"
by Scott Anderson
July 6, 2008
The New York Times
"As with every other survivor of a near-lethal suicide attempt that I spoke with, Debbie told her story with an almost eerie poise. There was one moment, though, at which she suddenly fell silent, where words failed her.
“You know, I hear myself describing all this,” she said, “but it seems completely surreal. I feel like I’m describing a movie I saw or a book I read. Even sitting here now and looking at that” — she motioned to her cane — “it’s hard to believe this is something I actually did.”
I suspected part of her incredulity stemmed from the recentness of the event; it had been less than three years. But perhaps it was also rooted in something more profound. What united all the survivors I spoke with was a sense of having been so utterly transformed by their experiences that, in essence, they had become different people.
In California, I met with Ken Baldwin, a schoolteacher who, in the grips of a deep depression 22 years ago, leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge.
“I’ve had two lives,” Baldwin said. “That’s the only way I’ve ever been able to describe it. Up to the day I jumped, that was one life, and now this is another. I’m not so much a changed man as a completely different one, and that’s why it’s so hard to even recollect what I was like back then, what I was thinking.”
...
“I’ll tell you what I can’t get out of my head,” he told me in his San Francisco living room. “It’s watching my hands come off that railing and thinking to myself, My God, what have I just done? Because I know that almost everyone else who’s gone off that bridge, they had that exact same thought at that moment. All of a sudden, they didn’t want to die, but it was too late.""
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/us/11child.html"Prosecutors Say Boy Methodically Shot His Father"
by John Dougherty and Anahad O'Connor
November 10, 2008
The New York Times
"An 8-year-old Arizona boy charged with premeditated murder in the deaths of his father and another man shot each victim at least four times with a .22-caliber rifle, methodically stopping and reloading as he killed them, prosecutors said Monday... Although investigators initially said they thought the boy might have suffered severe physical or sexual trauma, they have found no evidence of abuse, said Roy Melnick, the police chief in St. Johns, Ariz., where the shootings occurred... An investigation found no evidence that the boy had had disciplinary problems at school or shown signs that he was troubled, Chief Melnick said."
I recall hearing that Sartre once remarked that the fear isn't that you'll be thrown off a bridge; the fear is that you'll throw yourself off the bridge, though I have lost the citation.
***
I don't really know what I have to say about all these examples. Perhaps it has something to do with the idea that we (we) can make decisions that don't fit, don't cohere (perhaps can't be fitted into) the rest of one's life, all the things that one has done previously. It happens sometimes that we just do things. Or maybe it is something more like what West had to say: that we (some of us, at least) occasionally feel the urge to do terrible things, just because - and sometimes we do them.
2 comments:
These are all ways of looking at what Hume once said: "Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my little finger."
Or maybe they're thoughts about Anscombe, and the thought that one answer, as valid as any other, to the question "why are you doing this," is "just 'cause." Perhaps we can surprise even ourselves sometimes with what we'll do _just_ 'cause.
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