I have recently been reading the seven volume series Rising Up and Rising Down by William T. Vollman. The books strike me as one person's confrontation with mortality, but not in the way that most of us deal with the issue. Vollman does not deny death's existence but instead goes on a decades long global search of the ways and reasons that humans kill each other, seeming to earnestly look for a moral calculus that clearly delineates when human-inflicted death is justified and when it is not. Obviously Vollman is not a pacifist, he argues for murder in some cases.
Epic is the only word I can find to get close to the scope of this thing. And fascinating, completely dark and fascinating, leaving me with a feeling that I am statistically very lucky to have been randomly born into a time and place that was not in the midst of political insurrection or genocide. And as the descriptions of death and the interviews with its practitioners are told, I come to the conclusion that an utterly pacifist stance is really the only rational one. As long as any type of murder can be justified, by Vollman's rigorous calculus or anyone else's, it's a slippery slope to mass-murder, war, and genocide. Maybe pacifism is an idealist dream but more and more I'm convinced that with the few years we're given on this planet anything less than idealism is a cop out.
