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

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

Death

Volume VI, Number 4 | fall 2013

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"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.

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The Afternoon Meal, by Luis Meléndez, c. 1772

Last Meals

By Brent Cunningham

The choice of the final meal contains a curious paradox: why mark the end of a life with the stuff that fuels it?

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Map

Departures

A million ways to die.

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Miscellany

Sherwood Anderson died in 1941 of peritonitis, having swallowed a toothpick at a party. He was sixty-four. Tennessee Williams choked to death on a plastic eye-drop cap at a hotel in 1983. He was seventy-one.

1623 | London

Involved in Mankind

For John Donne, no man is an island.More

c. 500 | Persia

To the Dogs and the Birds

The Zoroastrian way of death.More

1951 | Wales

Protest Song

Dylan Thomas rages against the dying of the light.More

Charts & Graphs

Spoiler Alert

Murders, accidents, and suicides from novels and films.

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Black and white of photograph of American writer Michael Herr standing.

Black and white photograph of American surgeon and author Sherwin Nuland.

Black and white photograph of English poet Robert Browning seated.

Joseph Heller

Color photograph of American physician Jack Kevorkian.

Black and white photograph of Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel.

Photograph of American author and editor Bess Lovejoy.

I was born without knowing why, I have lived without knowing why, and I am dying without either knowing why or how.

—Pierre Gassendi, 1655

Painted portrait of Scottish philosopher David Hume.

Color photograph of American physician Jack Kevorkian.

David Hume & Jack Kevorkian

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