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

Slaves in ancient China during the Zhou dynasty were sometimes buried alive with their recently departed masters in order that they might continue to serve them in the afterlife.

1390 | Japan

Walking in Circles

The dangers of thinking too much.More

1842 | Philadelphia

Plague Party

Edgar Allan Poe welcomes Death to the party.More

c. 500 BC | Ephesus

Carted Off All the Same

The luckiest men die worthwhile deaths.More

Charts & Graphs

Average Life Expectancy

Will you live longer than a Founding Father or a wife of Henry VIII?

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Portrait of Chinese Daoist Zhuangzi.

Painted portrait of Scottish philosopher David Hume.

Photograph of Soviet Russian writer and journalist Vasily Grossman.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Black and white photograph of critic and novelist Mary McCarthy.

Black and white image of Greek biographer and writer Plutarch.

The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 43 BC

Black and white photograph of English writer Virginia Woolf.

Black and white photograph of French writer and film director Marguerite Duras.

Virginia Woolf & Marguerite Duras

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