Billy Wilder’s grave, Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, Los Angeles:
R.I.P.
Death
Mementos
At midday each June 21, a shaft of light pierces the roof of a mausoleum in Brussels’ Laeken Cemetery and creates a heart of light.
It’s not clear whether this was deliberate. The tomb’s occupants, Louise Flignot and Léonce Evrard, died in 1916 and 1919, and the mausoleum was not built until 1920. Its designer, one Georges deLarabrie, is not known to have produced any other work, and the planning documents don’t mention the heart.
When Sir Lawrence Tanfield died in 1625, his wife composed this inscription for their joint monument at Burford in Oxfordshire:
Here shadows lie
Whilst earth is sadd,
Still hopes to die
To him she hadd.
In bliss is hee
Whom I loved best;
Thrice happy shee
With him to rest.
So shall I bee
With him I loved,
And he with mee
And both us blessed.
Love made me poet,
And this I writt;
My heart did do it,
And not my wit.
See Workaround, Reunion, and Early Arrival.
Last Moments
In 1937 a Sabena Junkers Ju 52 crashed in Ostend — the plane struck a factory chimney while attempting to land in thick fog. Everyone aboard was killed, including Princess Cecilie, the older sister of Prince Philip, later Duke of Edinburgh.
She had been eight months pregnant, and a newborn infant was discovered in the wreckage. It’s speculated that she had given birth during the flight, and that this had led the pilot to try to land in hazardous conditions.
Query
Jones had been greatly depressed; he declared himself a murderer, and would not be comforted. Suddenly he asked me a question. ‘Are not the parents the cause of the birth of their children?’ said he. ‘I suppose so,’ said I. ‘Are not all men mortal?’ ‘That also may be admitted.’ ‘Then are not the parents the cause of the death of their children, since they know that they are mortal? And am I not a murderer?’ I was, I own, puzzled. At last I thought of something soothing. I pointed out to Jones that to cause the death of another was not necessarily murder. It might be manslaughter or justifiable homicide. ‘Of which of these then am I guilty?’ he queried. I could not say because I had never seen the Jones family, but I hear Jones has become a great bore in the asylum by his unceasing appeals to every one to tell him whether he has committed murder, manslaughter, or justifiable homicide!
— Rueben Abel, ed., Humanistic Pragmatism: The Philosophy of F.C.S. Schiller, 1966
All in the Family
This curious epitaph is found at Martham Church in Norfolk:
Here Lyeth the Body of Christr. Burraway, who departed this
Life ye 18 day of October, Anno Domini 1730.
Aged 59 years.
And there Lyes ☞
Alice who by his Life
Was my Sister, my mistress
My mother and my wife.
Dyed Feb. ye 12. 1729
Aged 76 years.
According to Thomas Joseph Pettigrew in Chronicles of the Tombs (1888), in 1670 Martham farmer Christopher Burraway had seduced his daughter, Alice, and she had borne him a son, who was placed at a foundling home. When the son turned 20 he was apprenticed to a farmer and eventually came to Martham, where he applied to Alice for a job, not knowing their relation. By this time the father was dead. She hired him and eventually married him, becoming “mother, sister, mistress and wife, to this modern Œedipus.”
At age 76 she recognized a peculiar mark on his shoulder and, realizing she’d married her son, “was so horror stricken that she soon after died, he surviving her scarcely four months.”
See Endless Love.
Misc
- It’s illegal to mispronounce Joliet.
- G.K. Chesterton left an unfinished poem titled Plakkopytrixphylisperadaulantiobatrix.
- Alms has no singular.
- The Spanish village Trasmoz has been cursed and excommunicated by the Catholic Church.
- “The wink was not our best invention.” — Ralph Hodgson
An Irish riddle: Yonder he is through the stream, a man without a coat, a man without a belt, a man of hard slender legs, it is my woe that I cannot run. Death.
R.I.P.
Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős’ epitaph reads “Végre nem butulok tovább” — “I’ve finally stopped getting dumber.”
One World at a Time
Thomas Jefferson to the Rev. Isaac Story, Dec. 5, 1801, on the afterlife:
When I was young I was fond of the speculations which seemed to promise some insight into that hidden country, but observing at length that they left me in the same ignorance in which they had found me, I have for very many years ceased to read or to think concerning them, and have reposed my head on that pillow of ignorance which a benevolent Creator has made so soft for us, knowing how much we should be forced to use it.
“I have thought it better, by nourishing the good passions & controlling the bad, to merit an inheritance in a state of being of which I can know so little, and to trust for the future to him who has been so good for the past.”
Reunion
In the church of St. Mary Magdalen in Mulbarton, Norfolk, is mounted a copper diptych, a memorial to resident Sarah Scargill, who died in 1680. The left panel remembers Scargill as “a Person of unimitable Devotion, of a most nice and tender Conscience, of sweet Behaviour, and in all Things so faithfull a Servant of God, that I dare contest the Divine Goodness to have rewarded her.” The right panel reads:
Dear Love! one feather’d Minute, and I come,
To lye down in thy dark retiring Room,
And mingle Dust with thine, that we may have,
As when alive, one Bed, so dead, one Grave,
And may my Soule teare through the vaulted Sky,
To be with Thine, to all Eternity.
Oh! how our Bloodless Forms will that Day greet,
With Love Divine, when we again shall meet,
Devest of all contagion of the Flesh,
Full fill’d with ever lasting Joys, and fresh,
In Heaven above, (and’t may be) cast an Eye,
How far Elyzium doth beneath us lye.
Dear! I dis-body and away,
More swift than Wind,
Or flying Hind,
I come, I come, away.
Daniel Scargill.
A Long Sleep
In 1999, archaeologists made a stunning find near the summit of a stratovolcano on the Argentina–Chile border. Three Inca children, sacrificed in a religious ritual 500 years earlier, had been preserved immaculately in the small chamber in which they had been left to die. Due to the dryness and low temperature of the mountainside, the bodies had frozen before they could dehydrate, making them “the best-preserved Inca mummies ever found.” Even the hairs on their arms were intact; one of the hearts still contained frozen blood.
Known as the Children of Llullaillaco, they’re on display today at the Museum of High Altitude Archaeology in Salta.