A long time ago I remember a class discussion about the Japanese writer Yukio Mishuma who killed himself in a Japanese ritual. It had to do with killing yourself in the prime of your life in order to preserve your honor. There was somehow no honor in living into a withering state. There was all this talk comparing the writer to the athlete who retires in the prime of his career in order to maintain his self respect. And I believe there was the requisite bullshit that retired athletes say about having nothing left to prove.

How pathetic that all seemed to me. It just sounded like the same old Lord Byron nonsense about living fast and dying hard, and the stupid line from the Who song “I hope I die before I get old.” What a load of horseshit. Bernard Lewis is still writing great books in his 90s. George Burns, Buddy Ebsen. What the fuck is old? Old is just a concept for the young who fear not being young anymore. I’ll step out the door myself before someone inevitably slams it on me. The whole thing sounds like death anxiety distilled into ever more elaborate conceptualization. The fear of death is so great that the only way to overcome the fear is to feel that you can control it, control the means, the time, the circumstances.

Age simply means adapting, constantly growing out of and into new situations, being a creator. It takes an incredible amount of courage not to anesthetize yourself with alcohol or prescriptions in order to march towards the cliff which you ultimately must fling yourself over, all the while holding yourself up through the daily routines, the disappointments of family and friends, the rude manipulation of the business world, the callous stupidity of casual observers. To take all the shit and make something out of it takes sheer determination that you don’t see when you are young.

The idea of dying with honor seems a selfish one. In the end people forget you, forget your life, what kinds of clothes you wore, what side of the bed you preferred, how long you liked to sit on the can, that you blew your nose on your sleeve. Very few people are remembered by more than a few acquaintances for a generation or two after they die. When they die their honor dies with them. All that is left is of them is the conversation of others, and that changes with the prevailing winds. T. S. Eliot is all but forgotten now. Ezra Pound, Sinclair Lewis, Henry Miller, all writers who inspired a multitude were of another era, it seems. Arnold, Carlyle, Tennyson nobody but old professors read. They all have been buried like the small time Midwest farmer. Their ghosts just had a reason to hang around longer.

The most respectable people are the ones who carry on their business until the end, though others sling mud on them daily, spit on them and abuse them. One day told they are gods and geniuses, the next withered remnants of what they used to be they slough it all off and continue going through the routines of living. It is something that most people people do and is why most people are honorable in their own way. The very few who think they have to end it all at any point aren’t honorable in my eyes. They are simply escaping. Because in the end honor is a two sided concept that involves one’s identity and one’s own conduct as measured by the greater society that one is a part of. Where the individual sees honor the community sees escape. The idea of suicide with honor sounds to me like the runner who quits after running a third of the race because he is running as fast as he can and knows he can only run slower and slower. He is contented with himself that he ran as fast as he could, but not being able to bare seeing the young runner with more stamina eventually surpass him, he takes his baton and goes home.

Whenever I say things like this to people of Asian descent I get the standard remark: you don’t understand the culture, as if by disagreeing with their ways or ideas I don’t understand. That is so sad. I could just as easily say that by using that remark on me they are failing to understand American culture. And I have said that. I usually get a self absorbed smirk, just as any person will give you when you disagree with them. Then they go their way, plodding through their own routines, preserving their own measure of honor unto their death.