Tag: death

From Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party – the Bradshaws talked off death. He had killed himself– but how? Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with the thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it? And the Bradshaw’s talked of it at her party!” She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They (all day she has been thinking of Bourton, of Pete, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop everyday in corruptions, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death. 

tom-isaacs:

Sleeping is like death – Chiharu Shiota

“Beds are the places where almost everyone is born and dies,” the artist explains. “That’s why they are such enthralling objects. I always use objects that have already been used, as they are full of history. What’s more, every person who gets up leaves a different body print on the bed. It’s fascinating.”

[…]

“Sleep is a bit like death,” the artist continues. “You never know if you are going to wake up. When you’re lying in bed at night and the lights are off, in your mind you go over what you did during the day; you slowly slip into your dreams, and you are caught in a web of thoughts, which I represent by all these threads; we get close to our subconscious, maybe like we would when death is near.”

Source: mu-inthecity.com

Peter Tillessen, 40 Jahre Kernspaltung (40 years of Nuclear Fission), (2012)

Press release: “40 Years of Nuclear Fission looks like an old scientific textbook that explains the origins of nuclear fission, illustrated by captivating black and white photographs of sculptural shapes. In fact the book is not an academic but personal compilation by photographer Peter Tillessen. The 40 photographs show excrements of the black-headed earthworm, which aggressively ploughs through a cemetery in Zurich. The pictures of those fragile sculptures are contrasted with parts from the detailed descriptions of nuclear fission from the original book, a text by Darwin that explains the work of earthworms and a text by the artist, who describes his childhood in the atomic age as a son of an atomic engineer. The number 40 is in this compilation no accident: Tillessen took the pictures on his –rainy– fortieth birthday for one of his best friends to pay off his debts from a bet – as he wasn’t a father of a big family (like his father) at the age of 40. That’s what he had pretended to his friend at the age of 27. The design of the book in the book accentuates the biographical fission within the big context of the atomic age: particularly the way the photographer examines the father’s book to reflect his own situation and to become aware of the earth’s fragility”