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.

8 | Tomis

Don’t Look Back

Ovid on resurrection. More

1390 | Japan

Walking in Circles

The dangers of thinking too much.More

1862 | Virginia

Eve of Battle

Clara Barton reports from the frontline.More

Charts & Graphs

How They Went

Match the deceased with cause of death.

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

Black and white engraving of Roman author Petronius.

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

Black and white photograph of Bolshevik officer Yakov Yurovsky.

Photograph of Soviet Russian writer and journalist Vasily Grossman.

Color photograph of American writer Annie Dillard.

Black and white photograph of English poet Robert Browning seated.

Black and white photograph of Russian author Leo Tolstoy.

What is death? A scary mask. Take it off—see, it doesn’t bite.

—Epictetus, c. 110

Painted portrait of English physician and author Thomas Browne.

Color photograph of American poet and critic Paul Zweig.

Thomas Browne & Paul Zweig

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