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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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

Titus Andronicus is William Shakespeare’s bloodiest play; the body count reaches fourteen. Rounding out the top-three deadliest plays are Richard III (eleven) and King Lear (ten).

1842 | Philadelphia

Plague Party

Edgar Allan Poe welcomes Death to the party.More

1437 | Hanyang

Crackdown

Choson Dynasty mourning etiquette.More

1862 | Virginia

Eve of Battle

Clara Barton reports from the frontline.More

Charts & Graphs

Reanimators

Techniques for returning from the land of the dead.

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American writer Philip Roth.

Black and white of photograph of American writer Michael Herr standing.

Sculpture bust of Greek historian Herodotus.

Black and white photograph of Russian author Leo Tolstoy.

Black and white image of Japanese haiku poet Kobayashi Issa.

It is not my design to drink or sleep; my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.

—Oliver Cromwell, 1658

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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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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