The Suicide Note to end all others

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A Massachusetts man shot himself to death with a silver bullet in Harvard Yard after penning what may go down as one of history’s great suicide notes, published online at SuicideNote.info. The New York Post reports:

New York native shot himself to death in Harvard Yard last week — after penning an epic 1,905-page suicide note.

Mitchell Heisman, 35, quoted Thomas Jefferson, Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Einstein as he attempted to explain his motives in the rambling missive, which included a lengthy preface and 1,433 footnotes.
Heisman put the encyclopedia-sized note online and asked that the Web page be kept up after his death, so that everyone could know his feelings about life and the universe.

“I propose opening your mind towards the liberation of death; towards exposing the blind faith in life as a myth, a bias, and an error,” he wrote.

The massive document contains little information about his life, but includes many long passages touching on issues such as Jesus, the Battle of Hastings in 1066, sociology and the First Amendment.

“If my hypothesis is correct, this work will be repressed,” he surmised on the first page.

The note ends with a 19-page list of sources and the comment “What good suicide note would be complete without a bibliography?”

Heisman, who lived in Somerville, Mass., graduated from the University of Albany with a BA in psychology. He worked in several Boston-area bookstores and was able to work on his farewell note thanks to an inheritance from his father, an engineer who died when Heisman was 12



His note can be found here:

http://www.suicidenote.info/

The site includes a place for it to be downloaded.

Considering his note is more an explorative philosophical proposal, I figured it'd be great fodder here.

Assuming anyone will actually bother to read the suicide note of an apparently learned man who took the time to not only make a dissertation out of his suicide but also included a full bibliography. Gotta respect that.

I thought suicide notes generally just explain reasons for the suicide. If someone was going to end his life, I wonder why he would bother to write so much in a suicide note.

Read what he's written. It's actually pretty much on par with the kind of stuff you'd see here in terms of philosophical depth and political depth. Like someone who could have posted here regularly.

It's less like a suicide note and more like a book, this should be published.

Most books aren't 2000 pages, either. More like an anthology. Could be printed in multiple volumes.

1900 pages is not a "dissertation." It's not even a textbook.

For reference, the longest textbook I've ever read all the way through was Campbell/Reece Biology (7th ed) which was about 1300 pages. That book was very large, and very heavy. 1900 pages should be broken up into a trilogy or something.

See the post right above yours.

Yeah, I didn't see that one until after I posted.

So, has anyone actually read the whole note yet?

I'm a painfully slow reader and 2000 pages is gonna be a lot to digest. I'll read over it over a period of time but there's no way that's going to be read in any near future time period.

The decedent was nutsy Fagn.

ruveyn

Out of total ignorance of the note my first thought would be that the guy found something more worthwhile in death than life. Perhaps I might be persuaded by his material but at this point I find life more interesting.

Suicide is nothing more than giving up on a problem at hand. The only time this isn't the case is normally when there is some noble act (such as throwing oneself on a hand grenade or any other such type of action).


Edit: actually that's kinda the whole point of his books: that he sees a drastic problem with liberal democracy and freedom of speech and he didn't see any other solution than to kill himself. I'm sure he's wrong, of course...like most people here who like to make such grandiose analyses and statements.

A view of the totality of experiencing life from moment to moment, which I find very rewarding, as a problem, strikes me as a very limited mindset.

Just reading the table of contents of the whole thing is pretty entertaining.

"How Rome was Raped by Jesus' Penis of the Spirit, Contracting a Deadly Virus"


Man....I wanna use that as a title for something so badly now.

The guy was probably a Narcissistic, ego maniac and he probably generated most of it with software, including the bibliography. Whatever.