Daunt/Less

I am putting to rest one persistent thought tonight.

Paton wonders in his book, Cry, the Beloved Country, “What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another? What broke when he could bring himself to thrust down the knife into the warm flesh, to bring down the axe on the living head, to cleave down between the seeing eyes, to shoot the gun that would drive death into the beating heart?”

And what about when he decides to take his own life? Does something break in him, as well?

Is the breaking unhurried, and unrelenting, and agonizing? Or is it a shattering--sudden and ravaging?

Or perhaps it is a birthing, rather than a breaking? A creation rather than a destruction? A filling up of the void which had been the very reason for the giving up; except that in the final moments, what fills the void is a dauntlessness that is unusable but for a singular purpose--ending one's life.   

Dauntlessness. It is neither courage nor a lack of it. It is only the absence of fear. In fact, it is only an absence--an absence of reasons to continue, rather than having reasons to stop.

And I believe if one pauses long enough, he will find in himself a fearsome capacity to empathize— the tabooed recognition of the human tendency to give up and stop.

Instead of hope.