The Dead Toreador, by Édouard Manet, c. 1864. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Death

Volume VI, Number 4 | fall 2013

Purchase

"The Antiquary's Last Will and Testament" from The English Dance of Death, by Thomas Rowlandson, 1814.

Preamble

Memento Mori

By Lewis H. Lapham

Learning how to die, as Michel de Montaigne once rightly said, is the unlearning of how to be a slave.

Death on a battlefield, atop a horse riding towards the left, wearing a hat with many feathers, other figures of Death battling to left and right in the background, by Stefano della Bell

Essay

Squeak & Gibber

By John Crowley

Humanity’s greatest feat of rationality lies in the explanations we use to grapple with our own mortality.

Map

Departures

A million ways to die.

View

Miscellany

On June 4, 1827, Hector Berlioz wrote to his sister Nancy about James Fenimore Cooper’s recently published novel The Prairie, in which the protagonist of Cooper’s Leatherstocking series, Natty Bumppo, is killed off. “I devoured it straight off,” Berlioz stated. “I reached the end at seven in the evening, and was still at the foot of one of the columns of the Pantheon in tears at eleven o’ clock!”