The Grim Reader Writings on Death, Dying, and Living On

by Spiegel, Maura; Tristman, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780385485272
• ISBN10: 0385485271
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-03-17
• Publisher: Anchor

Summary

From the best-sellingHow We Dieby Sherwin Nuland to our fascination with serial murders, from the AIDS epidemic to the concerns of our aging population, America continues to express a widespread curiosity about death and dying. InThe Grim Reader, editors Maura Spiegel and Richard Tristman have gathered the best of the new writings on the subject of death along with classic statements on mortality to produce an essential resource for the heart and mind. Historians tell us that death was once a public experience, circumscribed by religious ceremony, that gradually disappeared as our medical ability to forestall it grew more confident. This clinical capacity to mediate death-to postpone it with machines, to relieve its pain and suffering-has made it once more a public subject. Though death remains inevitable, denial, taboo, and shame have been banished in favor of reflection, candor, mutual aid, and acceptance. In their personal reckonings with death, these writers and thinkers wrestle with the indomitable fact, discover emotional insights and methods of coping unknown to them before the crisis of terminal illness. And in poems, eulogies, private expressions of love and loss, letters of condolences, we find inspiration and solace. From the reflections of Grace Paley on the death of her mother to Jessica Mitford's sociology of American funeral customs, from Freud's musing on the transience of life to Milan Kundera's story of laughter at a funeral,The Grim Readeroffers a fresh and unmediated encounter with mortality and its many dimensions."

Author Biography

About the Editors

Maura Spiegel teaches at Columbia University and Barnard College.  She has recently completed a book on the history of emotions in the nineteenth century.

Richard Tristman was a professor of literature for twenty-eight years.  He is a contributor to The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and is now writing a book on the idea of indecency.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xiii	(2)
Preface	xv
PART 1 RECKONINGS	10	(100)
WRESTLING WITH THE FACT	10	(30)
Sigmund Freud
On Transience	10	(4)
Berlot Brecht
On His Mortality	14	(2)
Michel de Montaigne
To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die	16	(9)
Thomas Nagel
Death	25	(8)
C. P. Cavafy
The Horses of Achilles	33	(2)
Vladimir Nabokov
Speak, Memory	35	(5)
BEING BRAVE AND BEING SCARED	40	(48)
Philip Larkin
Aubade	40	(2)
Paul Zweig
Departures	42	(19)
John Keats
Sonnet	61	(1)
Marguerite Yourcenar
With Open Eyes	62	(4)
Adam Smith
On the Death of David Hume	66	(6)
William Hazlitt
On the Fear of Death	72	(8)
John Ashbery
Fear of Death	80	(2)
Robert Louis Stevenson
Aes Triplex	82	(6)
TIME TO BE OLD	88	(22)
A. R. Ammons
from Garbage	88	(5)
Samuel Clemens
On Old Age	93	(2)
Luis Bunuel
Swan Song	95	(6)
Kingsley Amis
Lovely	101	(1)
Philip Larkin
The Old Fools	102	(8)
PART 2 WHAT WORDS ARE THERE?	110	(70)
LEFT BEHIND	110	(22)
Paul Auster
Portrait of an Invisible Man	110	(5)
Donald Justice
Sonnet to My Father	115	(1)
Colette
He Died in His Seventy-Fourth Year	116	(5)
Alvin Feinman
True Night	121	(2)
Emily Dickinson
Peoms and a Letter	123	(6)
Sharon Olds
The Death of Marilyn Monroe	129	(3)
ONE FIGHT MORE	132	(20)
Sir Thomas Browne
Religio Medici	132	(2)
James Merrill
An Upward Look	134	(2)
Simone de Beauvoir
A Very Easy Death	136	(8)
Nicole Loraux
A Woman's Suicide for a Man's Death	144	(8)
SONS AND DAUGHTERS	152	(28)
Grace Paley
Mother	152	(2)
James Baldwin
Notes of a Native Son	154	(8)
Philip Roth
Patrimony	162	(5)
Anne Sexton
The Child-Bearers	167	(2)
Elizabeth Rosen
My Mother's Death	169	(11)
PART 3 GIVE DEATH THE CROWN: WAR, PESTILENCE, GENOCIDE	180	(78)
IN ITS MIDST	180	(44)
Jasper Griffin
On Epic Death	180	(2)
Alan Moorehead
Gallipoli	182	(5)
Giovanni Boccaccio
The Plague in Florence	187	(9)
Samuel Pepys
The Plague in London	196	(10)
Primo Levi
October 1944	206	(9)
Robert Jay Lifton
Immersion in Death	215	(9)
OUR PLAGUE: AIDS	224	(34)
Emmanuel Dreuilhe
Mortal Embrace	224	(5)
Thom Gunn
Terminal	229	(1)
Paul Monette
3275	230	(28)
PART 4 MAKING ARRANGEMENTS	258	(94)
THE "FORMAL FEELING": RITES AND RITUAL	258	(38)
Emily Vermeule
A Very Active Dead	258	(9)
Geoffery Gorer
Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain	267	(13)
Sheila Awooner-Renner
I Desperately Needed to See My Son	280	(5)
George Barnard Shaw
On the Cremation of His Mother	285	(4)
Richard Selzer
Remains	289	(7)
DEATH CULTURES	296	(34)
Philippe Aries
The Modern Cemetery	296	(6)
Jessica Mitford
The American Way of Death	302	(10)
Rudolf Schafer
Photographing the Dead	312	(2)
Roland Barthes
Camera Lucida	314	(3)
Siegfried Giedion
The Mechanization of Death	317	(5)
Erwin Panofsky
The Dangerous Dead	322	(8)
LEGACIES	330	(22)
E. A. J. Honigmann
The Second-Best Bed	330	(10)
Carlos M. N. Eire
From Madrid to Purgatory	340	(12)
PART 5 DEATH ISSUES	352	(48)
FINAL CARE	352	(26)
George Orwell
How the Poor Die	352	(11)
Anne Munley
The Hospice Alternative	363	(7)
Joseph A. Califano
Death Management	370	(8)
EUTHANASIA AND ASSISTED SUICIDE	378	(22)
Timothy Quill
The Burdens of Aggressive Medical Treatment	378	(2)
Ronald Dworkin
Life's Dominion	380	(6)
Michael Burleigh
"Euthanasia" in Germany	386	(14)
PART 6 A HEALTHY DISTANCE	400	(19)
Samuel Beckett
Malone Dies	400	(2)
Stanley Elkin
The Beginning of the (Living) End	402	(7)
Monty Python
The Dead Parrot	409	(4)
Milan Kundera
Graveside Laughter	413	(6)
PART 7 RECAPITULATION	419
William Shakespeare
Hamlet: The Graveyard	419