So the story of Mitchell Heisman’s suicide is bizarre in a way that most suicides are not in that it was premeditated for some years before it was finally undertaken. It is nonetheless tragic. Heisman took his life, it appears, as part of a semi-scholarly examination into the meaningless of life – ‘an experiment in nihilism’ he called it.

The suicide note Heisman penned is a little lengthier than your typical note – running a total of 1,905 pages with “1,433 footnotes, a 20-page bibliography, and more than 1,700 references to God and 200 references to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche”.