It has long astonished me how clever we have become about eliminating the visibility (that is to say, the reminders) of death in our modern world.
This has not happened only by chance and greater competition for space from “life enterprises” – there is deep subconscious death denial at work here, manifesting [...]
“Death? It’s the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing!” Aldous Huxley
Seeing this provocative phrase atop one of the pages of the Perpetua’s Passages site made me pick up Huxley’s excellent compilation of essays on art again, “On Art and Artists”. Although I didn’t find the source of the quote there, I did find [...]
If I have one gripe with many green and woodland cemeteries it is that they don’t think deeply enough about the consequences to humans and human culture of making cemeteries more “natural”. This regards above all finding a place for enduring memorials in natural cemeteries.
This morning I came across an interesting story from the UK, [...]