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

Purchase

"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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Death on a battlefield, atop a horse riding towards the left, wearing a hat with many feathers, other figures of Death battling to left and right in the background, by Stefano della Bell

Squeak & Gibber

By John Crowley

Humanity’s greatest feat of rationality lies in the explanations we use to grapple with our own mortality.

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Map

Departures

A million ways to die.

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Miscellany

Crested ducks are known to perform acts of cannibalism, mallards acts of necrophilia.

1854 | London

Morbid Diary

John Stuart Mill anticipates the end.More

1951 | Wales

Protest Song

Dylan Thomas rages against the dying of the light.More

1849 | Filey

Gone Like Dreams

Charlotte Brontë grieves for her brother and sisters.More

Charts & Graphs

How They Went

Match the deceased with cause of death.

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

Photograph of Soviet Russian writer and journalist Vasily Grossman.

Black and white photograph of English writer and critic Lytton Strachey.

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

Sculpture bust of Greek dramatist Euripides.

Black and white photograph of Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel.

Engraving of William Shakespeare from the first folio edition.

If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.

—Jonathan Swift, 1706

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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Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Lapham’s Quarterly Is on Hiatus

By Lapham’s Quarterly

But the American Agora Foundation is already planning for the future. More

The Colosseum, attributed to Robert Eaton, c. 1855.

DÉjÀ Vu

Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

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Terracotta funerary plaque, Greek, Attic, c. 520 BC.

The World in Time

Robert D. Kaplan

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. More

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