You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In a previous publication on “risk writing” , I discussed the role of writing fiction as a life-sustaining or death-facilitating process in certain authors' lives, citing Joseph Conrad and Cesare Pavese, respectively, to illustrate these two opposite effects. The present paper is about Pavese only and is concerned with a quite different topic: the role of styles of mentation — ways of thinking, idiosyncrasies of reasoning, patterns of syllogizing, modes of “concludifying,” pecularities of logic — in relation to suicide. I begin with two general assertions: (a) that among any large number of individuals there are certain styles or patterns of mentation or logic that intensify the probability of a suicide, and (b) that within any one individual there is a range or armamentarium of styles of reasoning available to him, but that certain suicide-facilitating styles of reasoning appear during moments when he is perturbed (and thus may precede the suicide), including those moments when his level of disturbance is increased by his very thinking about suicide.
In addition, I wish specifically to describe Pavese's diary writings in further detail, focusing on his styles of thinking (especially when he was thinking of self-destruction), which seemed almost inexorably to lead (or push) him to suicide.
He was born in 1908 and died in 1950. He was born in the Piedmont province of northern Italy, that lovely agricultural area between the Swiss Alps and the Italian Riviera. As a boy, he loved