Click here to read Sasha Sagan’s 2014 essay for The Cut: My parents taught me that even though it’s not forever — because it’s not forever — being alive is a profoundly beautiful thing for which each of us should feel deeply grateful. If we lived forever it would not be so amazing. In this video, Sasha … Read more“Lessons of Immortality and Mortality From My Father, Carl Sagan”
A sobering and urgent documentary on the challenges of living in the face of mass extinctions and climate catastrophe. For more on this subject, visit the Living in the Time of Dying website.
A concise presentation on the subject of mortality from the Epicurean philosophical perspective, from the Society of Friends of Epicurus.
I was delighted to stumble across this ritual firefly procession in honor of the Twilight King during my evening walk last night. The event was arranged and performed by a troupe called The Art of Spontaneous Spectacle, which has been organized by local actors and directors unable to ply their craft in orthodox venues due … Read moreThe Art of Spontaneous Spectacle
This massive touring festival event has been a sell-out smash in the UK for several years, though of course it’s currently on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic. Festival of the Dead offers a cross-cultural mash-up of secular Dia de Muertos-inspired aesthetics with new circus/new burlesque performance styles; not what you’d call “deep” in comparison with … Read moreFestival of the Dead in the UK
Despite their distinct lack of streaming video options, the ladies and gentlemen of the late 19th century were not short of amusing and instructive pastimes. Late Victorian social media was centered around clubs running the thematic gamut from banal to whimsically outré. During the 1890s, examples of the latter kind ranged from the Whitechapel Club … Read morePoetic Faith (or, Why Oscar Wilde Declined to Join the London Thirteen Club)
By Tony Wolf I recently took part in the month-long online course Make Your Own Memento Mori: Befriending Death with Art, History and the Imagination, which was organized and taught by Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein. This course combines extensive and fascinating weekly readings and viewings, lectures, discussions, art and writing prompts and so-on, towards a “final project” of each … Read moreThe Flowerskull Mask: A Thanatopositive Art Project
Here’s the full text of Whitman’s O Me! O Life!: Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects … Read more“What will your verse be?”
This acclaimed 2003 documentary was inspired by the also-acclaimed 1973 book The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. Positing that humans’ awareness (and denial) of their own mortality has been the driving force behind civilization, Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for literature and influenced generations of social anthropologists, philosophers and psychologists.
By Tony Wolf Since the late 1990s I’ve been sporadically developing a philosophically rational, ecologically sound and communally festive approach to mortality, inspired by the motto memento mori ergo carpe diem – “remember death and therefore seize the day”. My interpretation of carpe diem encompasses Epicureanism as well as the perspective that a meaningful life … Read moreFlower Skull Marottes