I met Wintermute, once upon a time. He was not someone I'll put on my list of The Top Ten People Who Have Influenced Me, but he seemed to me to be an acceptable, friendly guy. I cannot get much from a smile and a handful of quickly-chosen words, unfortunately. I certainly cannot glean enough to understand why people make the decisions they make.
Maybe he just found out he had AIDS. What would you do? Maybe someone in his life, someone that we'll never meet, just walked out and slammed the door. Maybe, and I think this is more likely, he woke up on another grey September morning heading towards winter, in an empty bed in a tiny room, and when he reached over to turn his computer on, he knocked a glass off the table, and as he looked at the glass shards on the floor, he said to himself, "well, that's it, I've broken a glass. I might as well shoot myself."
To me, sitting in my warm room with a lovely view, this sounds like a ridiculous line of reasoning, But I've many friends for whom I've immense respect, that I've watched make a series of decisions that were each rational in and of itself, but led inexorably to a conclusion that to people not privy to the process seemed hurtful, irrational, stupid. I remember spending an evening in an emergency room with a friend whose explicit reasoning was much less concrete than having broken a glass, but after a lot of talking, I understood the reasons.
In this situation, we don't have that ability, that resource.
In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had." ...
Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby."
I think his decision was almost certainly the wrong one. But there is a difference between 'almost certainly' and 'certainly' and it's always seemed to me that in that space is much of what makes people interesting.