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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Hunting Dogs with Dead Hare, by Gustave Courbet. 1857.

Mournful Creatures

By Virginia Morell

Humans may be the only animals who understand our mortality, but when it comes to grieving, we are not so unique.

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Map

Departures

A million ways to die.

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Miscellany

C. S. Lewis was sixty-four, John F. Kennedy forty-six, and Aldous Huxley sixty-nine at the times of their deaths—all within an eight-hour span on November 22, 1963.

1849 | Cape Cod

Natural Law

Henry David Thoreau meditates upon a shipwreck. More

1842 | Philadelphia

Plague Party

Edgar Allan Poe welcomes Death to the party.More

1889 | New York City

Mistakes Were Made

A guide to avoiding premature burial. More

Charts & Graphs

Spoiler Alert

Murders, accidents, and suicides from novels and films.

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Oil painting portrair Michel de Montaigne in red robes and white collar

Black and white image of Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca the Younger.

Color photograph of American writer Mary Roach leaning on door.

Portrait bust of Greek dramatist Aeschylus.

Photograph of American short-story writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe.

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

Black and white of Welsh poet and writer Dylan Thomas.

Black and white photograph of English poet Robert Browning seated.

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1928

David Hume & Jack Kevorkian

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