Karl Marx wrote most of Capital at a side table not much larger than an open issue of The New York Times, feeling as he did for most of his creative life, a pain in his side that reminded him constantly of his father’s early death from liver cancer.

And anyway,

the phenomenon of suicide would appear to argue that even mortal life as we now experience it is too long for some people. 

And anyway, 

kites don’t work without the string…