Today is the Feast of St. Augustine.
At Confessions, Bk. VI, Ch. 11, Augustine speaks of "a greed for enjoying present things that both fled me and debased me."
A paradox of pleasure. Certain pleasures madly striven after prove fleeting and unreal, yet not so fleeting and unreal that they cannot degrade and debase their pursuers destroying both their souls and their bodies.
At the apogee of this mad trajectory, the pleasure pursued issues in death as in the case of David Carradine's death by auto-erotic asphyxiation in a Bangkok hotel room. Is there any more extreme case of the insane abuse of the body as a pleasure factory?
As I noted earlier, the celebrity chef, 'foodie,' and gastro-tourist, Anthony Bourdain, hanged himself in his hotel room. I speculated that the man was spiritually adrift. "If Bourdain had a spiritual anchor, would he have so frivolously offed himself, as he apparently did?"
Then I found the graphic below. Now I know the man was spiritually adrift. The view he gives vent to is utter nihilism. If the summum bonum lies in the gratification of the lusts of the flesh, why didn't Bourdain find his solace in further such indulgence?
Enjoy the ride and then commit suicide. And then there is Jeffrey Epstein whose ride to the bottom ended miserably.
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