Intimations of mortality

Jan 12, 2010 10:10

Over the last year I seem to have written a larger than usual number of blog posts about people I know who have died.

In the 1980s, when our parents died all within the decade, Val and I were suddenly aware of being the older generation.

Now, however it is the in-between generation who are disappearing. People who were older than us, but younger than our parents. These people were our teachers, mentors, guides, people from whom we learnt stuff. And so many of them seem to have died over the last year.

Here are some of the ones I've blogged about:
The next stage, I suppose, is blogging about one's contemporaries. I wonder if anyone will blog about me when I snuff it?

Andii Bowsher, in Nouslife: In defence of lists quotes Umberto Eco as saying:The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.

I was reminded of a TV series a couple of years ago called "The human footprint", which was a kind of list of the effects human beings have on the planet -- how many cubic feet of farts one emits in a lifetime and so on.

One item intrigued me -- the average Brit knows 1750 people in their lifetime. I decided to make a list of all the people I knew, and what I remembered about them. I'm at about number 750 now. The dead live on in the memory of the living, but when I am dead, who will remember those? Is that why at funerals we sing "Memory eternal"?

So here's my list of some people I've met who have died over the past year. Memory eternal!

repose, friendship, in memoriam, old friends, aquaintances, death, eternal memory, memoirs, teachers, obituaries, rip

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