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Friday, February 27, 2009

Life / Books "It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it."

Posted by Brendan Kiley on Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 11:21 AM

Please waste a little more of it with Obit Magazine.

Friedrich Nietzsche suffered a syphilitic collapse, followed by 10 years of physical and mental decline, until his death in 1900. The philosopher had coprophagic tendencies — he was partial to eating his own feces. David Hume, devout empiricist, died “cheerfully” of a disorder of the bowels. Karl Marx, his body covered in carbuncles, endured countless gruesome illnesses as he wrote Das Kapital. He died severely depressed after the deaths of his wife and beloved first child. He fell asleep in an easy chair and never woke up. Hannah Arendt stepped into a pothole and tripped as she got out of a taxi outside her apartment in New York City and later that night started coughing, passed out, and died of a heart attack. Albert Camus once said he couldn’t imagine a death more meaningless than dying in a car accident. Just three years after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature at 44, he died … in a car accident.

Its lead story right now? The newspaper industry.

(Thanks, ArtsJournal.)

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Comments (5) RSS

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i just wiki'd carbuncles. :(

Posted by eensey on February 27, 2009 at 11:32 AM

@1, me too. Heh.

Charles, that's something else about Marx you can take after and imitate.

Posted by EmilyP on February 27, 2009 at 12:30 PM

Me three! I knew the word carbuncle but I wanted to know exactly what the symptom was. Delightful!

I also love how carbuncle used to be the name of a gemstone. Even though I'm sure both meanings descended from the Latin "little coal" source, I prefer to imagine that someone named the gem after the oozing abscess.

Posted by leek on February 27, 2009 at 12:59 PM

Does this mean I have to eat my own poop to become an ubermensch? Thanks, I'll pass.

Posted by Chris down in The Couv on February 27, 2009 at 3:12 PM

Tycho Brahe (astronomer) died of a burst bladder when he refused to leave a fancy dinner table to take a leak (it was considered very improper at the time).

Posted by Urgutha Forka on February 27, 2009 at 5:33 PM