Know that it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!...Look, I am not laughing now, crying, crying for you, Christine, who have torn off my mask and who therefore can never leave me again!...Oh, mad Christine, who wanted to see me!
The exhilaration of battle was agreeable to him, but the sight of the dead, with their clay faces, blank eyes, and stiff bodies, which, when not unnaturally shrunken, were unnaturally swollen, had always intolerably affected him. He felt toward them a kind of reasonless antipathy which was something more than the physical and spiritual repugnance common to us all. Doubtless this feeling was due to his unusually acute sensibilities - his keen sense of the beautiful, which these hideous things outraged. Whatever may have been the cause, he could not look upon a dead body without a loathing which had in it an element of reselltment. What others have respected as the dignity of death had to him no existence - was altogether unthinkable. Death was a thing to be hated. It was not picturesque, it had no tender and solemn side - a dismal thing, hideous in all its manifestations and suggestions. Lieutenant Byring was a braver man than anybody knew, for nobody knew his horror of that which he was ever ready to encounter. ("A Tough Tussle")
I crawled over the mountain of death, Watching the corpses roll down like the stones. Searching for the light which everyone always spoke of. I fought the wolves and also the death, and knocked the door, which already had a thousand handprints, soaked with blood. The door opened finally and I saw the light, which hit me in the heart and pushed me down the steep. I fell into the never ending pit, watching others crawl up the mountain in the search of light.
Some people experience a life-changing sensation that transforms how they see the world after a near-death experience, but the way I see it, we’re all dying – nay, we’re all dead – and it is up to us to be our own self-necromancers to find some form of life and spirit to reanimate the corpse of a life spent wanting.
By death the moon was gathered in Long ago, ah long ago;Yet still the silver corpse must spinAnd with another's light must glow.Her frozen mountains must forgetTheir primal hot volcanic breath,Doomed to revolve for ages yet,Void amphitheatres of death.And all about the cosmic sky,The black that lies beyond our blue,Dead stars innumerable lie,And stars of red and angry hueNot dead but doomed to die.
Aleks opened his mouth to reassure his friend when he heard something that chilled him to the bone.“Aleksander Aaron Arkadion! What in the hell is wrong with you! Why are you dragging that mangled corpse through town? You traumatized an entire first-grade class on a field trip to the town center,” Ma said, striding up to them pointing down to the body that Aleks still had a hold of.He looked down at the ankle he was holding.“Fuck my life.” Aleks looked behind his ma at the trail of blood heading back to the ice cream parlor.Liam laughed, his arms wrapped around his waist holding his sides.
At sunset, on the river ban, KrishnaLoved her for the last time and left. . .That night in her husband's arms, Radha feltSo dead that he asked, What is wrong,Do you mind my kisses, love? And she said,Not not at all, but thought, What is It to the corpse if the maggots nip?
When you die, you want to die a beautiful death. But what makes for a beautiful death is not always clear. To die without suffering, to die without causing trouble to others, to die leaving behind a beautiful corpse, to die looking good -- it's not clear what is meant by a beautiful death. Does a beautiful death refer to the way you die or the condition of your corpse after death? This distinction is not clear. And when you start to stretch the image of death to the method of how to dispose of your corpse as befitting your image of death, everything grows completely out of hand.
Aleks opened his mouth to reassure his friend when heheard something that chilled him to the bone.“Aleksander Aaron Arkadion! What in the hell is wrong with you! Why are you dragging that mangledcorpse through town? You traumatized an entire first-grade class on a field trip to the town center,” Ma said,striding up to them pointing down to the body that Aleks still had a hold of.He looked down at the ankle he was holding.“Fuck my life.” Aleks looked behind his ma at the trail of blood heading back to the ice cream parlor.Liam laughed, his arms wrapped around his waist holding his sides.
How came she by her death? How came she there? Was she slain by accident, or had she met with violence? were the questions that pressed upon our thoughts. But we said little then and after a time left her where we found her. It mattered not to her that the bed was hard or the air cold.("A Night In An Old Castle")
Better beware of the newly deadOf the white-handed ghostAnd the brightness of these lamps . . .wrote Luc Berimont in 1940, in Reign of Darkness.I’ve always felt the greatest reluctance to go anywhere near, to touch, a fresh corpse. For me, it’s an unseemly thing. Useless. Hostile. Cunning. Dangerous. The ‘presence’ is much stronger, more perceptible one hour after death than one hour before. By my observation, this was not the case with Heisserer.He was entirely absent from his head, his hands,his quivering body. He was gone instantly, unburdened of his absurd life, released.
Three days after the liberation of Buchenwald, I became very ill; some sort of poisoning. I was transferred to a hospital and spent two weeks between life and death.One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.