“Time brings odd permutations.” Joan Didion wrote that. She thought of it when she found herself one evening sitting at the dinner table with the potently virile John Wayne and his beautiful young wife. How had she gotten there? She had always defined herself as a journalist with no significant aspirations for fame. Yet there she was, well into her writing career, drinking wine with the most singular representation of the American lust for fame. Time does bring odd permutations. I often wish I was gifted with the Tralfamadorian (see, the aliens of Slaughterhouse-Five) faculty of observing the fourth dimension. Maybe then the absurdities of human experience would fit into place. Why is it always such a shock when we hear that an inspiration of ours has committed suicide? David Foster Wallace, Robin Williams, and now Anthony Bourdain. Yesterday, Bourdain was a highly romanticized bad-boy who shone a much-needed light on the dark underbelly of the New York restaurant scene, who captivated vast hordes of Americans that vigorously consumed his video productions and dreamed of experiencing “the real [any far-away place].” But today, his life and works are doused with an odd tint of sadness; he killed himself, so he must have been depressed. Was all that romanticism and loquaciousness merely a way for him to externally cope with the internal black sheet of depression?

Faulkner, through his incessantly cynical character Jason Compson III, describes all human experience as absurd, and suicide as the “final absurdity.” When his son Quentin decides to take his own life, his penultimate actions are to brush his teeth and don his hat. This is Quentin’s his way of applying order to his chaotic life, a life in which he finds it increasingly difficult to define a system of morality, a life in which he fears the passage of time and the delineation of the present. If only he could merge the past and the present, maybe he would be able to help his promiscuous sister, help her to regain her lost purity. When Quentin realizes that such a unification of time is impossible, he feels that the only solution is to experience that final absurdity, with a pair of flat-irons and a healthy dosage of H2O.

I don’t know why Anthony Bourdain committed suicide and I will not try to explain why. I will also not apply the macabre tinge of depression to his life’s work and I will not allow this to diminish his inspirational role in my life. I am sad that I will no longer be able to consume any new material by him, but that is purely selfish. I am happy that he ended things on his own terms and I will use his example as a reminder that I never have the faintest idea of where anyone is, or where they are going, mentally. We as humans tend to define a person’s life by where they are now, or at the moment they died. Maybe five years ago, she was gregarious and attractive, but today she is crippled with alcoholism. We can see only the present, so that is how we define. Personally, suicides like Anthony’s remind me that I can enjoy the present and appreciate the past with each person around me, but cannot predict the approaching absurdities of their life. I am horribly crippled by my inability to see across time. And I am e’er baffled by the odd permutations that time ne’er fails to bring. That is one concept that I will not try to reduce to absurdity.

Warmly,

The Sauntering Simpleton