Death and the dead

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind;


And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

— John Donne (1573 – 1631), Devotions 17.

 

Said a foolish householder of Wales
‘An odour of coal gas prevails.’
            She then struck a light
            And later that night
Was collected in seventeen pails.
— anon in W. S. Baring-Gould, The Lure of the Limerick, 185.

 

Mr Hobbs told me that the cause of his Lordship’s death was trying an Experiment … it came into my Lord’s thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in Salt. They … bought a Hen, and made the woman exenterate it, and then stuffed the body with Snow, and my Lord did help doe it himselfe. The snow so chilled him that he fell immediately ill …they put him into a good bed, warmed with a Panne, but it was a damp bed that had not been layn-in in about a yeare before, which gave him such a colde that in 2 or 3 dayes … he dyed of Suffocation.
— John Aubrey, of Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Penguin Books, 179.

 

The constancy with which the same crimes repeat themselves every year with the same frequency and provoke the same punishment in the same ratios, is one of the most curious facts… We can tell beforehand how many will stain their hands with the blood of their fellow-creatures, how many will be forgers, how many poisoners, almost as one can foretell the number of births and deaths.
— Adolphe Quetelet, 1796 – 1874), on French crime statistics.

 

He wrote Observations on the Bills of Mortality very ingeniosely, but I beleeve, and partly know, that he had his Hint from his intimate and familiar friend, Sir William Petty, to which he made some Additions, since printed. And he intended (had he lived) to writt more on the subject.
— John Aubrey, of John Graunt (1620 – 1674), Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Penguin Books, 274.

 

The long habit of living indisposeth us to dying.
— Thomas Browne (1605 – 1682)

 

… the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men who never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought — the subtle rapture of a postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes junior (1841 – 1935), 1886.


He prayeth best who loveth best
All things great and small.
The Streptococcus is the test
I love him least of all.
— Hilaire Belloc (1870 – 1953), Short talks with the dead and others, 1926.

 BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.

— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906.

 

The king never dies
— Sir William Blackstone (1723 – 1780), Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book 1, chapter 7.

 

There is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave — under the deep, deep sea,
Or in a wide desert where no life is found.
— Thomas Hood (1798 – 1845), Silence

 

… Francesco Redi explained that reading Homer had led him to make this kind of experiment. If the putrefaction of flesh is sufficient to engender insects, asked Redi, why in Book XIX of the Iliad was Achilles so anxious that the body of Patrocles should not become the prey of flies? Why did he ask Thetis to protect the body against insects which might produce worms and corrupt the flesh of the dead?
— Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life (1973), 54.

 

Then in the nostrils of the slain she pour’d
Nectareous drops, and rich ambrosia shower’d
O’er all the corse. The flies forbid their prey,
Untouch’d it rests, and sacred from decay.
— Homer (???? – ????), what Redi read.

 

I put a snake, some fish, some eels of the Arno, and a slice of milk-fed veal in four large, wide-mouthed flasks; having well closed and sealed them, I then filled the same number of flasks in the same way, only leaving these open. It was not long before the meat and the fish in these second vessels became wormy and flies were seen entering and leaving at will; but in the closed flasks I did not see a worm, though many days had passed since the dead flesh had been put in them. Outside on the paper cover there was now and then a deposit, or a maggot that eagerly sought some crevice by which to enter and obtain nourishment. Meanwhile the different things placed in the flasks had become putrid and stinking.

Not content with these experiments, I tried many others at different seasons, using different vessels. In order to leave nothing undone, I even had pieces of meat put under ground, but though remaining buried for weeks, they never bred worms, as was always the case when flies had been allowed to light on the meat.
— Francesco Redi (1626-1697) Esperienze (1668).

 

Either he’s dead, or my watch has stopped.
— Groucho Marx (1895-1977), A Day at the Races.

 

Economic rationalism is simply the reverse of rational economics.
— Duncan Bain, 1729 uses for a dead economist, List Books, 1979.

 

In the last conversation his daughter remembered, he said: ‘The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.’ A little later, at the dining-table, his wife asked him a question, and then, when she received no reply, she looked at him and saw that he was dead. It was probably the only question that Diderot had left unanswered for the last fifty years.
— J. B. Priestley, Literature and Western Man, Mercury Books, 1962, pp 87-88.

 

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