The Grim Reader

Table Of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
 
PART 1:  RECKONINGS
 
WRESTLING WITH THE FACT
Sigmund Freud: On Transience
Bertolt Brecht: On His Mortality
Michel de Montaigne: To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die
Thomas Nagel: Death
C. P. Cavafy: The Horses of Achilles
Vladimir Nabokov: Speak, Memory
 
BEING BRAVE AND BEING SCARED
Philip Larkin: Aubade
Paul Zweig: Departures
John Keats: Sonnet
Marguerite Yourcenar: With Open Eyes
Adam Smith: On the Death of David Hume
William Hazlitt: On the Fear of Death
John Ashbery: Fear of Death
Robert Louis Stevenson: Aes Triplex
 
TIME TO BE OLD
A. R. Ammons: from Garbage
Samuel Clemens: On Old Age
Luis Buñuel: Swan Song
Kingsley Amis: Lovely
Philip Larkin: The Old Fools
 
PART 2: WHAT WORDS ARE THERE?
 
LEFT BEHIND
Paul Auster: Portrait of an Invisible Man
Donald Justice: Sonnet to My Father
Colette: He Died in His Seventy-Fourth Year . . .
Alvin Feinman: True Night
Emily Dickinson: Poems and a Letter
Sharon Olds: The Death of Marilyn Monroe 129
 
ONE FIGHT MORE
Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici
James Merrill: An Upward Look
Simone de Beauvoir: A Very Easy Death
Nicole Loraux: A Woman’s Suicide for a Man’s Death
 
SONS AND DAUGHTERS
Grace Paley: Mother
James Baldwin: Notes of a Native Son
Philip Roth: Patrimony
Anne Sexton: The Child-Bearers
Elizabeth Rosen: My Mother’s Death
 
PART 3:  GIVE DEATH THE CROWN: WAR, PESTILENCE, GENOCIDE
 
IN ITS MIDST
Jasper Griffin: On Epic Death
Alan Moorehead: Gallipoli
Giovanni Boccaccio: The Plague in Florence
Samuel Pepys: The Plague in London
Primo Levi: October 1944
Robert Jay Lifton: Immersion in Death
 
OUR PLAGUE: AIDS
Emmanuel Dreuilhe: Mortal Embrace
Thom Gunn: Terminal
Paul Monette: 3275
 
 
PART 4: MAKING ARRANGEMENTS
 
THE ‘‘FORMAL FEELING’’: RITES AND RITUAL
Emily Vermeule: A Very Active Dead
Geoffrey Gorer: Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain
Sheila Awooner-Renner: I Desperately Needed to See My Son
George Bernard Shaw: On the Cremation of His Mother
Richard Selzer: Remains
 
DEATH CULTURES
Philippe Ariès: The Modern Cemetery
Jessica Mitford: The American Way of Death
Rudolf Schäfer: Photographing the Dead
Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida
Siegfried Giedion: The Mechanization of Death
Erwin Panofsky: The Dangerous Dead
 
LEGACIES
E. A. J. Honigmann: The Second-Best Bed
Carlos M. N. Eire: From Madrid to Purgatory
 
PART 5: DEATH ISSUES
 
FINAL CARE
George Orwell: How the Poor Die
Anne Munley: The Hospice Alternative
Joseph A. Califano: Death Management
 
EUTHANASIA AND ASSISTED SUICIDE
Timothy Quill: The Burdens of Aggressive Medical Treatment
Ronald Dworkin: Life’s Dominion
Michael Burleigh: ‘‘Euthanasia’’ in Germany
 
PART 6: A HEALTHY DISTANCE
Samuel Beckett: Malone Dies
Stanley Elkin: The Beginning of the (Living) End
Monty Python: The Dead Parrot
Milan Kundera: Graveside Laughter
 
PART 7: RECAPITULATION
William Shakespeare: Hamlet: The Graveyard