Stephen Rowland

“The sages of antiquity, who put themselves to death as proof of their maturity, had created a discipline of suicide which the moderns have unlearned. Doomed to an uninspired agony, we are neither authors of our extremities nor arbiters of our adieux; the end is no longer our end: we lack the excellence of a unique initiative – by which we might ransom an insipid and talentless life, as we like the sublime cynicism, the ancient splendour of an art of dying. Habitués of despair, complacent corpses, we all outlive ourselves and die only to fulfil a futile formality. It is as if our life were attached to itself only to postpone the moment when we could get rid of it.”
― Emil M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay