Why did the chicken cross the road, and why did a billionaire financier shoot himself?
To get to the Other Side.
Certainly, for most humans, death is no joking matter though one might reasonably assume that murderous dictators consumed with wars of conquest are at least indifferent to it, if not pleased by it. Thus, the thousands killed in the meat grinders of Verdun in 1916 and eastern Ukraine in 2022. But “ordinary Janes and Joes” most likely think, when they can’t avoid thinking of it, of death with trepidation.
HEADLINE: February 23, 2023. New York Post. “Billionaire financier Thomas H. Lee found dead of self-inflicted gunshot wound in NYC office: sources.” * I have little further information at this time, but it raises those old questions: What makes one person who ostensibly has “everything” commit suicide whereas another person sometimes even in the worst of painful cancers love life so much to hold onto it tenaciously? What’s the driver of suicide? And what’s the driver of continuing life?
OUR LIMITED KNOWLEDGE OF OTHERS
I don’t know any information about Lee other than what I read today; I can only speculate how a 78-year-old guy came to a point in late life that another day was unbearable. Fifth Avenue office, expensive home in the Hamptons, hobnobbing with the rich and famous, balls, and parties, and public dinners too numerable to recount, vacations, expert at leveraging buyouts, wise enough to buy Snapple in 1992 and resell it in 1994 for 32 times his purchase price, recipient of many awards for philanthropy and patronage that included a $22-million gift to Harvard…Lee seems to have had everything including a wife, children, and grandchildren. His only public “failure” seems to have centered on Vertis Communications, America’s fifth-largest printer; Vertis filed for bankruptcy in 2008. But other than that, he still died with an estimated net worth of $2 billion.
But, as we know, no one takes “it” with him into The Great Whatever. And that brings me into a speculative reverie. What is the nature of The Great Whatever? And why should we hasten to get there?
Circle on Screen Goes Round and Round, loading, loading...
Play the eerie reverie music here: Ta-daa’-dada; ta-daa’-dada. The screen goes blurry. Am I asleep or awake? Life seemed so “normal” before I read about Thomas H. Lee’s death.
In my dream state, I see Tron-like lines; they’re lighted, bright against a dark background. They are boundaries. I see them all around me, blocking my past and limiting my lateral movements: Stay within the lines, Donald. Stay within your limitations. And remember, up ahead is the ultimate boundary, you know, the one that billionaire Thomas H. Lee purposely crossed for whatever reason. Once beyond that line, he was as much over the horizon as a star sucked into a black hole. Whatever he took with him, the information that defined him, except for that retained in memories, disappeared into the blackness where the only certain boundary is the event horizon, the boundary that prevents reemergence. Once dead, always dead. One “event” prevents all other events.
Walk through Any Cemetery
In my dream, I walk through a cemetery with graves of my ancestors. One generation back, yeah I know most of them; they live in my memory. Two generations make things get a bit fuzzy, more incomplete, and even, in most instances no more familiar than those images in antique photos hung on walls of Cracker Barrel to lend a sense of human continuity and homelike belonging. Pictures portraying characters whose images could have been made by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. “Look, that one resembles Aunt Betty. I wonder…” Such is the dream state, ta-daa’-dada.
BOUNDARIES
One of the significant human restrictions in this seemingly boundless universe is boundary. Each of us is bounded by an ineluctable finiteness. Boundaries define us, but in life they are subject to changes in kind, shape, and position. But when we cross that last boundary…
What I could not do as a youth I can do as an adult, but that does not include my retaining what I could do as a youth, at least not physically; some boundaries form behind us. Even a “Tom Brady” eventually retires either by choice or force. And if the argument is that Einstein was working on The Equation of Equations on his deathbed, never seeming to stop, the boundary of death did stop him.
That makes me think that one reason for not prematurely ending one’s life is that familiarization with a bounded existence is the first parameter of life to disappear in death. The second parameter to disappear is the chance to tweak the boundaries of life or to push them off a bit in an expansion of what we are.
EAT THIS AND THAT, TAKE THIS SUPPLEMENT, AND EXERCISE FOR A LONGER LIFE
I encountered an acquaintance during a jog several years ago, engaging him in a brief conversation before our paths departed. In his seventies then, he was a faithful runner-power-walker, a one-time Marine going through the neighborhoods daily, running through the neighborhood park, and even on weekends participating in a group run up the local mountain, an elevational change of 1,700 feet stretched over three inclined miles. On that day when our paths chanced to cross, I told him he looked fit. He said, “I just want to make it to 80.” Duh!
Not 80 and a day, not 80 and a month, not 80 and twenty more years. Duh! If you are not inclined to push that final boundary as far into the future as you can, then you might be like Thomas H. Lee, who said at age 78 and for whatever reason, “This is far enough. Eighty is too far. Even seventy-nine is a stretch. Seventy-eight is good enough.”
WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? A GEOMETRY OF LIFE AND DEATH
There are more pages of research devoted to understanding suicide than there are pages in a bloated congressional budget (over 4,000 for the last one). It’s a topic that begs answers. The personal tragedies of suicide constrain those left behind, those who always want to know “why” as they experience the closing off of an avenue of relationship. But the new boundary for those left behind isn’t a temporary set of cones across a road under construction. That boundary is labeled with a sign that reads, “Dead end.” But we really don’t know, do we? Is it a “dead end”? For the living, yes. For Thomas H. Lee, there’s really no way to know.
But what we do know is that in the choice to commit suicide a human says, “No more boundaries as I understand them.” It’s the end of geometric life, then end of axiomatic existence.
Remember geometry class? Now there was a time of trepidation, of dread. I sometimes wonder whether or not Nietzsche and Kierkegaard weren’t just expressing their feelings after taking geometry from a chalk-dusted teacher, “If this, then thus. You skipped a step in your proof, Friedrich. You forgot the second postulate, Søren.”
What is that boundary from which we seem to start and understand? Is it a set of axioms and postulates? Recall that they do serve as starting points that, we’re told, are self-evident. “Two points and one straight line, that does the trick. You can’t have two points connected by two different straight lines. And straight lines? Well, they can run indefinitely while still remaining finite.” Euclid was so kind to pass on his axioms and postulates to more than two millennia of struggling sophomore minds. But maybe those stern geometry teachers had a point to make that wasn’t just applicable to shapes and proofs. “We learn geometry,” they told us, “because it teaches us how to think and understand our world.”
SHAPES ALL AROUND
Maybe they had a point, not so much a “location” represented by a “dot” with no size, but rather an emphatic notion. Life is, l after all, much ado about shapes located in space and bounded by time. We can’t get away from finding shapes around us, from faces that look similar to cloverleaf off-ramps. Circles and polygons, all framed by lines, all bounded. It’s how we distinguish this from that. The flowers in the garden aren’t each unbounded; they have edges, and we see them against a background. The stars, also. Everything seems to be bounded in this reality of life: Cell membranes limit the cell; skin limits the body; circumferences edge the wheel. An axiomatic life is one that starts with some postulates and builds to a personal geometry of recognizable shape, a bounded shape.
SUICIDE TAKES ONE OUT OF THE POSTULATES AND AXIOMS TO THE NON-EUCLIDEAN
There’s no way of knowing the current geometry of Thomas H. Lee. We don’t know even know whether or not he exchanged one kind of geometry for another, like going from Euclidean geometry to non-Euclidean geometry (maybe to Riemannian manifolds). We don’t know whether he now encounters any boundaries or even whether straight lines are for him not indefinite, yet finite, but infinite. Lee decided to leave the bounded for who knows what, the last boundary he crossed was the last boundary he crossed. If he still exists, he exists in the background against which we see shapes. That background is the formless, the non-geometric.
Remember all those manifestations of forms in this life—from UPS boxes to tree branches that might seem to be chaotic but that might also be fractals of repeating patterns—can be distinguished one from another by the backgrounds in which or against which they appear. And all those shapes of life rest for us on postulates and axioms. So much of what we are psychologically and mentally is axiomatic. So much of what we do proceeds through “a logic” that mimics geometry. And once we leave this geometry as Thomas H. Lee did, we enter an uncertain geometry or maybe a non-geometric realm, shapeless, incapable of being connected as in this life we know that “things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.”
We have no idea whether or not even as simple a statement about equal things is meaningful to Thomas H. Lee now that he has gone beyond life’s boundary. Here’s an axiom: Those who are alive can rely on the self-evident and run the proofs of their existence to find meaning.
I have no way of knowing whether or not Thomas H. Lee found this life meaningless. Maybe he was depressed enough to think that thinking itself, largely an axiomatic process that accepts certain postulates as a priori truth, was a useless wondering in chaos. Certainly, he had a rather well-ordered life from the perspective of an outsider. Maybe his inner sense of an axiomatic world that made some sense because of that which is self-evident, had collapsed into a formlessness. With no meaningful life-geometry in which proofs make sense because they rely on truths, entering a non-geometric realm might have been his logical alternative.
The “shape” of his life now lies in memory. The shapes of living he bequeathed those around him will last for a generation or two at best. Then they’ll possibly appear as an antique reminder like those antique pictures in trendy cafes and Cracker Barrel restaurants that we are similar to what he was, the shapes of some coffee-drinker’s life equal to the shape of Lee’s life. The axioms seem to be rather limited in number, so we all seem to use them as the bases of our lives until we cross that final finite boundary.
*https://nypost.com/2023/02/23/billionaire-financier-thomas-h-lee-found-dead-of-self-inflicted-gunshot-wound-in-nyc-office-sources/
To get to the Other Side.
Certainly, for most humans, death is no joking matter though one might reasonably assume that murderous dictators consumed with wars of conquest are at least indifferent to it, if not pleased by it. Thus, the thousands killed in the meat grinders of Verdun in 1916 and eastern Ukraine in 2022. But “ordinary Janes and Joes” most likely think, when they can’t avoid thinking of it, of death with trepidation.
HEADLINE: February 23, 2023. New York Post. “Billionaire financier Thomas H. Lee found dead of self-inflicted gunshot wound in NYC office: sources.” * I have little further information at this time, but it raises those old questions: What makes one person who ostensibly has “everything” commit suicide whereas another person sometimes even in the worst of painful cancers love life so much to hold onto it tenaciously? What’s the driver of suicide? And what’s the driver of continuing life?
OUR LIMITED KNOWLEDGE OF OTHERS
I don’t know any information about Lee other than what I read today; I can only speculate how a 78-year-old guy came to a point in late life that another day was unbearable. Fifth Avenue office, expensive home in the Hamptons, hobnobbing with the rich and famous, balls, and parties, and public dinners too numerable to recount, vacations, expert at leveraging buyouts, wise enough to buy Snapple in 1992 and resell it in 1994 for 32 times his purchase price, recipient of many awards for philanthropy and patronage that included a $22-million gift to Harvard…Lee seems to have had everything including a wife, children, and grandchildren. His only public “failure” seems to have centered on Vertis Communications, America’s fifth-largest printer; Vertis filed for bankruptcy in 2008. But other than that, he still died with an estimated net worth of $2 billion.
But, as we know, no one takes “it” with him into The Great Whatever. And that brings me into a speculative reverie. What is the nature of The Great Whatever? And why should we hasten to get there?
Circle on Screen Goes Round and Round, loading, loading...
Play the eerie reverie music here: Ta-daa’-dada; ta-daa’-dada. The screen goes blurry. Am I asleep or awake? Life seemed so “normal” before I read about Thomas H. Lee’s death.
In my dream state, I see Tron-like lines; they’re lighted, bright against a dark background. They are boundaries. I see them all around me, blocking my past and limiting my lateral movements: Stay within the lines, Donald. Stay within your limitations. And remember, up ahead is the ultimate boundary, you know, the one that billionaire Thomas H. Lee purposely crossed for whatever reason. Once beyond that line, he was as much over the horizon as a star sucked into a black hole. Whatever he took with him, the information that defined him, except for that retained in memories, disappeared into the blackness where the only certain boundary is the event horizon, the boundary that prevents reemergence. Once dead, always dead. One “event” prevents all other events.
Walk through Any Cemetery
In my dream, I walk through a cemetery with graves of my ancestors. One generation back, yeah I know most of them; they live in my memory. Two generations make things get a bit fuzzy, more incomplete, and even, in most instances no more familiar than those images in antique photos hung on walls of Cracker Barrel to lend a sense of human continuity and homelike belonging. Pictures portraying characters whose images could have been made by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. “Look, that one resembles Aunt Betty. I wonder…” Such is the dream state, ta-daa’-dada.
BOUNDARIES
One of the significant human restrictions in this seemingly boundless universe is boundary. Each of us is bounded by an ineluctable finiteness. Boundaries define us, but in life they are subject to changes in kind, shape, and position. But when we cross that last boundary…
What I could not do as a youth I can do as an adult, but that does not include my retaining what I could do as a youth, at least not physically; some boundaries form behind us. Even a “Tom Brady” eventually retires either by choice or force. And if the argument is that Einstein was working on The Equation of Equations on his deathbed, never seeming to stop, the boundary of death did stop him.
That makes me think that one reason for not prematurely ending one’s life is that familiarization with a bounded existence is the first parameter of life to disappear in death. The second parameter to disappear is the chance to tweak the boundaries of life or to push them off a bit in an expansion of what we are.
EAT THIS AND THAT, TAKE THIS SUPPLEMENT, AND EXERCISE FOR A LONGER LIFE
I encountered an acquaintance during a jog several years ago, engaging him in a brief conversation before our paths departed. In his seventies then, he was a faithful runner-power-walker, a one-time Marine going through the neighborhoods daily, running through the neighborhood park, and even on weekends participating in a group run up the local mountain, an elevational change of 1,700 feet stretched over three inclined miles. On that day when our paths chanced to cross, I told him he looked fit. He said, “I just want to make it to 80.” Duh!
Not 80 and a day, not 80 and a month, not 80 and twenty more years. Duh! If you are not inclined to push that final boundary as far into the future as you can, then you might be like Thomas H. Lee, who said at age 78 and for whatever reason, “This is far enough. Eighty is too far. Even seventy-nine is a stretch. Seventy-eight is good enough.”
WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? A GEOMETRY OF LIFE AND DEATH
There are more pages of research devoted to understanding suicide than there are pages in a bloated congressional budget (over 4,000 for the last one). It’s a topic that begs answers. The personal tragedies of suicide constrain those left behind, those who always want to know “why” as they experience the closing off of an avenue of relationship. But the new boundary for those left behind isn’t a temporary set of cones across a road under construction. That boundary is labeled with a sign that reads, “Dead end.” But we really don’t know, do we? Is it a “dead end”? For the living, yes. For Thomas H. Lee, there’s really no way to know.
But what we do know is that in the choice to commit suicide a human says, “No more boundaries as I understand them.” It’s the end of geometric life, then end of axiomatic existence.
Remember geometry class? Now there was a time of trepidation, of dread. I sometimes wonder whether or not Nietzsche and Kierkegaard weren’t just expressing their feelings after taking geometry from a chalk-dusted teacher, “If this, then thus. You skipped a step in your proof, Friedrich. You forgot the second postulate, Søren.”
What is that boundary from which we seem to start and understand? Is it a set of axioms and postulates? Recall that they do serve as starting points that, we’re told, are self-evident. “Two points and one straight line, that does the trick. You can’t have two points connected by two different straight lines. And straight lines? Well, they can run indefinitely while still remaining finite.” Euclid was so kind to pass on his axioms and postulates to more than two millennia of struggling sophomore minds. But maybe those stern geometry teachers had a point to make that wasn’t just applicable to shapes and proofs. “We learn geometry,” they told us, “because it teaches us how to think and understand our world.”
SHAPES ALL AROUND
Maybe they had a point, not so much a “location” represented by a “dot” with no size, but rather an emphatic notion. Life is, l after all, much ado about shapes located in space and bounded by time. We can’t get away from finding shapes around us, from faces that look similar to cloverleaf off-ramps. Circles and polygons, all framed by lines, all bounded. It’s how we distinguish this from that. The flowers in the garden aren’t each unbounded; they have edges, and we see them against a background. The stars, also. Everything seems to be bounded in this reality of life: Cell membranes limit the cell; skin limits the body; circumferences edge the wheel. An axiomatic life is one that starts with some postulates and builds to a personal geometry of recognizable shape, a bounded shape.
SUICIDE TAKES ONE OUT OF THE POSTULATES AND AXIOMS TO THE NON-EUCLIDEAN
There’s no way of knowing the current geometry of Thomas H. Lee. We don’t know even know whether or not he exchanged one kind of geometry for another, like going from Euclidean geometry to non-Euclidean geometry (maybe to Riemannian manifolds). We don’t know whether he now encounters any boundaries or even whether straight lines are for him not indefinite, yet finite, but infinite. Lee decided to leave the bounded for who knows what, the last boundary he crossed was the last boundary he crossed. If he still exists, he exists in the background against which we see shapes. That background is the formless, the non-geometric.
Remember all those manifestations of forms in this life—from UPS boxes to tree branches that might seem to be chaotic but that might also be fractals of repeating patterns—can be distinguished one from another by the backgrounds in which or against which they appear. And all those shapes of life rest for us on postulates and axioms. So much of what we are psychologically and mentally is axiomatic. So much of what we do proceeds through “a logic” that mimics geometry. And once we leave this geometry as Thomas H. Lee did, we enter an uncertain geometry or maybe a non-geometric realm, shapeless, incapable of being connected as in this life we know that “things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.”
We have no idea whether or not even as simple a statement about equal things is meaningful to Thomas H. Lee now that he has gone beyond life’s boundary. Here’s an axiom: Those who are alive can rely on the self-evident and run the proofs of their existence to find meaning.
I have no way of knowing whether or not Thomas H. Lee found this life meaningless. Maybe he was depressed enough to think that thinking itself, largely an axiomatic process that accepts certain postulates as a priori truth, was a useless wondering in chaos. Certainly, he had a rather well-ordered life from the perspective of an outsider. Maybe his inner sense of an axiomatic world that made some sense because of that which is self-evident, had collapsed into a formlessness. With no meaningful life-geometry in which proofs make sense because they rely on truths, entering a non-geometric realm might have been his logical alternative.
The “shape” of his life now lies in memory. The shapes of living he bequeathed those around him will last for a generation or two at best. Then they’ll possibly appear as an antique reminder like those antique pictures in trendy cafes and Cracker Barrel restaurants that we are similar to what he was, the shapes of some coffee-drinker’s life equal to the shape of Lee’s life. The axioms seem to be rather limited in number, so we all seem to use them as the bases of our lives until we cross that final finite boundary.
*https://nypost.com/2023/02/23/billionaire-financier-thomas-h-lee-found-dead-of-self-inflicted-gunshot-wound-in-nyc-office-sources/
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