Black Hole
Black Hole

Summary/Abstract: The wish to die can lead to action: suicide. The wish never to have lived, with reservations a few of which will be adverted to below, cannot. It is more radical although, precisely because you cannot do much about it, cheaper. It is more sophisticated, involving, beyond the present, intolerable situation, a good deal of reflection on the past and some even on the phenomenon of being. It is certainly of later origin in the evolution of human feelings. This essay will be devoted to its initial appearances in Greek and Hebrew sources, with the briefest appendix on India about which, regrettably, I am too ignorant to say more. In all three civilisations, it will emerge, the two centuries from around 700 B.C. are seminal. Jungian synchronicity, perhaps. Less magically, we may ascribe the concentration to certain traumatizing, social (in the widest sense) upheavals, combined with a lively cultural interchange covering a vast segment of the globe and producing there an, in important respects, common climate.

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