The New Yorker published a big piece by Ian Parker recently called "The Story of A Suicide - Two college roommates, a webcam, and a tragedy". One of the roomates is Tyler Clementi, the gay Rutgers student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge in 2010. The other is Dharun Ravi who is currently facing charges including invasion of privacy and bias intimidation (hate crimes). He and another student used a webcam to watch Clementi in an embrace with a man. Ravi talked about it on Twitter, and then two days later attempted to set up another viewing, inviting others to join in. Of course the precise causal link between the webcam spying and Tyler’s decision to jump will never be known.
What struck me most about the article was how much of a person remains unknown, even to those closest to them. Tyler’s parents say that they never saw signs of depression in him. The article ends with this paragraph:
On the night Jane Clementi learned that Tyler was gay, she said, “I told him not to hurt himself.” Not long before, a girl from his school had committed suicide. “We had talked about it briefly that summer, and for some reason that thought came to mind. And all I said was ‘Don’t hurt yourself,’ and he looked me right in the eye and he laughed, and said, ‘I would never do anything like that.'"
On my walk back from the subway station after reading the article the paragraph hung with me. My thoughts went riffing beyond this case to the way in which we never know others’ minds.
What do we do inside our boxes? Accept that we don’t know at all what goes on inside others’? Or do our best to know? Try to reach over and inside, in the full awareness that we can’t really know?
The process always comes back to yourself, like it or not. What you think you learn when you reach over – whether right or wrong – ultimately comes from your own box and back into it. But it’s worth the effort. Something changes on the way; what returns is more than a reflection.
And this is one of the reasons we write.
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