Yesterday, just after hearing the haunting and apocalyptic "A Day in the Life" by The Beatles on the radio, while approaching the crest of the roadway on the Tappan Zee Bridge (spelled wrong on an official New York State Thruway sign near Port Chester), with radiant Manhattan about 10 miles downriver to the left, I saw this sign, or its approximation, in the late-afternoon lambent light:
LIFE IS WORTH LIVING
along the right railing, with a "life line" phone number to call.
I suspect the signs (I saw one Saturday, coming from the other direction) are an attempt to ward off suicides, or at least potential pedestrian suicidalists (presumably with cellphones, to call the help line). One would think drivers bent on the act would not need to wait until reaching the highest point of the bridge (a lovely bridge, if I may so). Well, come to think of it, why would anyone need to reach the highest point of the bridge before leaping? Certainly, it would not be necessary in terms of the efficacy of the leap. A leap even at the first locus over water seems plenty high enough to do the deed. (But, as you all know, "I Leap for Kierkegaard.")
I also wondered: why limit signs like this to dramatic venues and vistas such as the Tappan Zee Bridge or the famously suicide-prone Golden Gate Bridge, et cetera? Are there not landward temptations to self-extinction? Indeed there are. Perhaps LIFE IS WORTH LIVING signs should be posted just as pointedly at the entranceways to workplaces, government offices, retail stores, churches, homes, rocky cliffs, flat plains, and at the doors of your local Wal-Mart, Target, The Home Depot, or other big-box store. And who but my eponymous graffiti artist who goes by the tag of LIFE should paint these vivifying signs?
Before you get all fretful about my mental state, let me add these are not lugubrious musings. Far from it.
Life is worth living.
I see the signs everywhere.
(A parenthetical word on bridges. Pons is the Latin word for bridge. Pontifex, a word for pope, literally in Latin means "one who makes a bridge." So does this mean I have been pontificating? Or am I simply bridging the gap between the quotidian and the numinous [check out that etymology!]?)
