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.

The Afternoon Meal, by Luis Meléndez, c. 1772

Essay

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?

Map

Departures

A million ways to die.

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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!”

Voices In Time

1854 | London

Morbid Diary

Brief thoughts on death from John Stuart Mill.More

Voices In Time

8 | Tomis

Don’t Look Back

Ovid on resurrection. More

Voices In Time

1862 | Virginia

Eve of Battle

Clara Barton reports from the frontline.More

Charts & Graphs

Tales of the Crypts

Fabulous final resting places.

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

Black and white photograph of Emily Dickinson sitting next to a desk.

Black and white photograph of former American Marine Guy Gabaldon.

Contributors

Black and white print of English politician, essayist, and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Detail of mural featuring Jacobus de Voragine, archbishop of Genoa and chronicler.

Painting of Greek philosopher Heraclitus weeping over a globe.

There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.

—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1714