Sense of an Ending - Barnes on Suicide!

This is an excerpt from the novel 'Sense of an Ending'.

''Alex showed me a clipping from the Cambridge Evening News. “Tragic Death of 'Promising’ Young Man”. They probably kept that headline permanently set up in type. The verdict of the coroner’s inquest had been that Adrian Finn (22) had killed himself “while the balance of his mind was disturbed”.

I remember how angry that conventional phrase made me: I would have sworn on oath that Adrian’s was the one mind which would never lose its balance. But in the law’s view, if you killed yourself you were by definition mad, at least at the time you were committing the act. The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide’s reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the state which paid the coroner?

And then, since you had been declared temporarily mad, your reasons for killing yourself were also assumed to be mad. So I doubt anyone paid much attention to Adrian’s argument, with its references to philosophers ancient and modern, about the superiority of the intervening act over the unworthy passivity of merely letting life happen to you.''