Did giving up the California license say that I would never again be fifteen-and-a-half?
Would I want to be?
Or was the business with the license just one more case of “the apparent inadequacy of the precipitating event”?
I put “the apparent inadequacy of the precipitating event” in quotes because it is not my phrase.
Karl Menninger used it, in Man Against Himself, by way of describing the tendency to overrate to what might seem ordinary, even predictable circumstances: a propensity, Dr. Menninger tells us, common among suicides. He cites the young woman who becomes depressed and kills herself after cutting her hair. He mentions the man who kills himself because he has been advised to stop playing golf, the child who commits suicide because his canary died, the woman who kills herself after missing two trains.
Note: not one train, two trains.
Think that over.
Consider what special circumstances are required before this woman throws it all in.
“In these instances,” Dr. Menninger tells us, “the hair, the golf, and the canary had an exaggerated value, so that when they were lost or when there was even a threat hat they might be lost, the recoil of severed emotional bonds was fatal.”
–Joan Didion