Curiosity saved my life

While my brain was rebooting after its flirtation with total mother board failure, NASA's rover Curiosity was completing its 563,270,400km journey from Cape Canaveral to the Gale Crater on Mars. We have become so accustomed to seeing images, from telescopes on earth and in orbit around it, of stellar objects unimaginably distant in time and space that we have become blase about distances within the solar system. If Ben Fogle, fresh from swimming the Atlantic, decided for some unfathomable reason to walk to Mars in Curiosity's footsteps, it would take him about 30,000 years to get there, at eight hours plodding per day. It's a long way.

When it was launched, Curiosity was not aimed at Mars but at where Mars would be 256 days later. In fact it was aimed at a specific window on the surface of the Martian atmosphere a couple of kilometres wide, which it needed to hit in order to land close to its target. In the event, it touched down 2.4km from the bullseye. This is equivalent to firing a rifle in London and putting the bullet through the middle of Sarah Palin's forehead in Alaska, give-or-take 2cm, which admittedly might not be accurate enough. Fortunately the Gale Crater is a more forgiving target than Ms Palin's ganglion and Curiosity is safely on the ground, and sending back spine-tingling images from another world.

My wife made an interesting observation the other day. She said that it is very difficult to be curious and depressed simultaneously. I like a challenge and this one seems as good as any. Wanting to know how things are going to turn out is certainly incompatible with wanting to be dead as soon as possible. Or at least, one has to make a choice which of these two desirable goals is the lesser evil.

I am curious about a lot of things. How my kids will change as they grow older, for example. They are already, aged six and seven, able to do things I've never mastered, like sight-reading music and speaking two languages. They will, I am sure, grow up into vastly more capable adults than I am and, other things being equal, I'd like to be around to see that. I'm curious to know whether Seth Shostak's prediction that SETI will detect a signal from another civilisation within the next 24 years (see here) comes true. If it goes to the wire, I'd be 66 when ET calls, an age that currently seems less plausible than the call. I am curious about the implications of the fact that different members of the same species of ape can decide to fly a car to Mars and an aeroplane into a skyscraper. I would like to know how the debate on whether we are hard-wired for religiosity (see, for example, this talk or this book or this interview with E.O. Wilson) turns out and therefore whether the Enlightenment dream of a world free from superstition is doomed. I'd like to see whether Martin Rees's prediction that we are living through our species' final century prior to extinction is more or less accurate than Ray Kurzweil's confident expectation that humanity is on the cusp of the 'singularity', a transition to an immortal, post-human utopia in which people are liberated by technology from care. Being a depressed realist, my money is on Rees and Jaron Lanier's observation that (to paraphrase) technology is crap, doesn't work and liberates us only momentarily, until we find a way to fill the void with yet more pointless work. More prosaically I am curious to know what the snowdrops and hellebores that I've planted as seeds collected over the last several years from wild populations around Europe look like when they start to flower in large numbers next year. I am sure that passionate gardeners live longer than other people, because there is always another spring to look forward to (gardeners in the tropics probably croak at the same age as everyone else).

The title of this post should really have been 'Curiosity deferred my death' but that more honest appraisal of my situation seemed both less euphonious and unlikely to draw anyone in. Unlike taxes and pace Kurzweil, death can neither be avoided nor evaded but it can be postponed. Usually, after a period of exceptionally low mood (and last week was as low as I've ever been), I experience a sort of relief rally, during which something akin to optimism clouds my otherwise impeccable judgement. This time, however, there hasn't even been a dead cat bounce. Curiosity, and a sense of deep obligation to the family members and friends who have rallied round me in a way that I simply don't deserve, have kept me going, despite a profound wish to curl up and die.

The Edge

There is nothing funny about suicide, for friends of the corpse. Well, almost nothing. An acquaintance of my parents killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head, when I was a schoolboy. I distinctly remember overhearing a conversation about the incident between my mother and a friend of hers. Friend: 'How did you hear?' Mother: 'God told me.' 'God' was Godfrey, a mutual friend of the dead man and my mother. There was a pause and then howls of laughter. Ours is a cruel species.

I have flirted mentally with the idea of suicide since childhood. As I have explained to countless exponents of the dark arts of mental health medicine, these flirtations have almost always taken the form of fantasies. I imagine myself, post-painless-suicide, breathing a sigh of relief and getting on with life after death, freed of the burdens of a perfectly ordinary life.

The gulf between suicide fantasies and suicide attempts is a vast and yawning chasm, precisely because, if it weren't, our ancestors would have reacted to the unrelenting misery of their prehistoric lives by ending them, as early as possible. Homo sapiens is not extinct because the dawn of consciousness gave birth to a capacity for enduring suffering without precedent in the history of life.

I tried to commit suicide a few days ago. For present purposes, the reasons don't matter. Because I was diagnosed years ago with clinical depression I consume a daily cocktail of more-or-less toxic pychotropic drugs and, for a few days after collecting my monthly prescription, I have the means in my medicine bag to kill myself painlessly. Once before I'd taken a handful of pills, knowing that I'd be very unlikely to die, but eager to put my life on the line. It wasn't so much a cry for help as a squeak and I fluffed it by failing to tell anyone until after I'd woken up. This time I really meant it and I swallowed most of the sleeping pills that I had to hand (amusingly enough, the reason I didn't swallow all of them is that I wanted to have a few left, in case I failed in my attempt to die). Just before I went to bed, not expecting to wake up, I lost courage. Cowardice is surely the most under-rated of human virtues. I sent an email to four friends, telling them what I'd done.

I woke up to find a policeman tickling me. 'Fuck off.' I said. 'Can't do that.' He replied and continued tickling. It is impossible to sleep while being tickled by a policeman, even when your brain is bathed in chemicals designed to shut it down. When you think about it, that fact puts medical technology in its place. After a while the tickling policeman announced that an ambulance had arrived and that it was going to take me to hospital. 'I don't want to go to hospital.' I said. 'I want to stay here and die.' Warming to my theme I added (I remember all this quite clearly) 'Do you have the right to take me to hospital, against my will?' 'Yes.' He said. 'If you don't agree to come, we'll section you.' I stood up.

The few hours I spent in hospital passed in a blur. A friend got through on the phone to the ward and I chatted to him for a while. I cannot remember anything about the conversation. Another friend arrived a few minutes later and sat by my bed for the rest of the morning, while I drifted in and out of consciousness. Later my brother and sister arrived, separately, and I will remember the gentle, loving smiles on their faces, as they looked down at me, for the rest of my life.

I spent the following days in a room that is a cross between a monastic cell and the Sandy Lane. Enveloped between crisp linen sheets, on a bed as yielding as a cloud, I slept and slept and slept. When eventually I emerged, I was plied with delicious food and wine, the latter administered in quantities carefully calculated to minimise the risk of brain damage while maximising the chances I'd think twice before having another go. For the record, I think 'two glasses' is a figure of speech.

A week or so has passed and I am back to what doctors refer to as 'normal for Norfolk'. I don't come from Norfolk but you'd never know. In the interim I've spent two days with my wife and children, on the astonishingly (to me) lovely beach north of the Hague. We played catch, built sandcastles and tried to engineer a channel between our deckchairs and the sea, which was about 5,000m away. I read stories from 'The Magic Faraway Tree' to Elsje and Pieter, while they curled up beside me in bed, and it was quite hard for a while to imagine wanting to be dead. I have, however, a good imagination.

The trials of life are hard. Some people (how I envy them) seem to confront life as a surfer does, punching through the breakers to reach the big waves that make life worth living. Others (like me) wallow in the shallow water, fearful of sharks. This is going to end only one way. Not today.