The reading of this report in the The Times....

Perugia A hillside cottage where the British exchange student Meredith Kercher was murdered is to be returned to its owner next week so that it can be rented out again, a judge ruled.

Alda Tattanelli, the owner, said that she had no intention of selling the property, in Perugia, despite its association with the murder of Ms Kercher in November 2007. Amanda Knox, Ms Kercher's American flatmate, and Raffaele Sollecito, Ms Knox's former Italian boyfriend, are on trial for the killing.

...instigated the mental resurfacing of this famous painting.
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The association of the report and Breughel's "Icarus" has something to do with a passage in the famous poem by Auden, "Musee des Beaux Arts":


In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

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Not so much that it was "not an important failure," but something closer to the idea that the ploughman must go on. The seasons do not stop, seeds need to be planted, and families feed. Bunny Wailer, the last man standing of The Wailers (Tosh and Marley are dead—bullet and cancer, respectively, did the undoing), put it this way in a tune called "Burial": "Let the dead bury the dead; I'm a living man, I got things to do." Meredith is yet another victim of that will to immortality that Diotima of Mantinea defined over 2000 years ago as the essence of all forms of beauty.