death
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Thomas Buddenbrook on the beginning of the end in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks: Happiness and success are inside us. We have to reach deep and hold tight. And the moment something begins to subside, to relax, to grow weary, then everything around us is turned loose, resists us, rebels, moves beyond our influence. And then it’s
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Mr Swales in Bram Stoker’s Dracula puts the human condition pithily: For life be, after all, only a waitin’ for somethin’ else than what we’re doin’; and death be all that we can rightly depend on.
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And while we’re on the theme of death and the Great War, here’s Joanna Cannan in High Table: Look on, Cynic, your dozen years, to the time when such words as these will be explained away as wartime hysteria, when such a marriage as is planned now, in this brief, pink-and-white haven, will be dissolved
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She had a beautiful mother, serene in a sepia photograph who cried over every debt; her father was happy-go-lucky, a charmer and very bright; a Methodist grandfather killed himself; her grandmother’s hair grew down to her knees. Cycling the three miles to grammar school in a uniform sizes too large with a second-hand hockey stick
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The flesh drained back on to the pillow so his nose poked up surprising, sharp, a single flower placed beside his head, below his green-pyjama’d shoulders – fragile, like a child laid lovingly to sleep. There were signs his nose had bled – otherwise he looked tidy and so still. His eyes were closed, his mouth fixed
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‘The hills are alive’ he sang every day as he dressed, until he was breathless and pumped full of drugs. In the end his heart couldn’t cope – perhaps it was all for the best. He carried on working and lived with habitual zest – tenacious of life, he’d never call illness a friend. ‘The hills are
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All you know for certain is you’ll die and so will all your friends; you spend your busy life avoiding this, the only thing you know. You don’t know how – a slow death years away, the heart attack tomorrow, the wasting of disease, a sudden accident, gunfire in the morning, or just old age. It’s
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When I came to say good-bye that night, Already you were drifting off Beyond the realms of speech and sight Or any common sight. Your cough At last was silent; eyes half-closed, Unseeing, yet I knew you heard, Felt my kiss, without a word Consented to let go. I dozed, And slept for half an
Virginia Rounding: Author, editor, proofreader, indexer 