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 D.C.

Death

Volume VI, Number 4 | fall 2013

"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.

More

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?

More

Map

Departures

A million ways to die.

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Miscellany

After the Golden Gate Bridge, the most popular spot in the world to commit suicide is Aokigahara Forest at the foot of Mount Fuji. Signs posted among the trees read: YOUR LIFE IS A PRECIOUS GIFT FROM YOUR PARENTS AND PLEASE CONSULT THE POLICE BEFORE YOU DECIDE TO DIE! Since the 1950s, more than five hundred people have killed themselves there, most by hanging.

c. 710 | Kyushu

Lost Child

Yamanoue no Okura on the death of his son.More

c. 58 BC | Egypt

The Fable of Hell

Diodorus Siculus observes an Egyptian funeral.More

c. 1600 | Denmark

Finite Jest

William Shakespeare clowns around among the graves.More

Charts & Graphs

American Ways of Death

The cost of dying in the United States.

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Color engraving of Italian poet, scholar, and humanist Petrarch.

Black and white photograph of Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi.

Black and white photograph of English writer and traveler Gertrude Bell.

Black and white photograph of American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath.

Black and white photograph of poet, diplomat, and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson.

Black and white photograph of Bolshevik officer Yakov Yurovsky.

Black and white photograph of Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel.

Black and white engraving of Roman author Petronius.

We and the dead ride quick at night.

- Gottfried August Bürger, 1773

David Hume & Jack Kevorkian

Lapham’sDaily

Thelonious Monk, Minton’s Playhouse, New York, 1947. Photograph by William P. Gottlieb. Library of Congress, Music Division.

Roundtable

Lewis Lapham Reads “’Round Midnight”

By Lapham’s Quarterly

Listen to the preamble to Music, the Fall 2017 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. More

U.S. secretary of agriculture Sonny Perdue meets with German minister of food and agriculture Christian Schmidt, 2017.

DÉjÀ Vu

Equal Climates

2017:

U.S. Department of Agriculture bans words related to climate change.

-350:

Aristotle denies that the climate is changing.

More

The Fall of Man, by Titian, c. 1550.

LQ Podcast

#13 Stephen Greenblatt

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. More

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