Word: ari
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...Hour of Our Death takes on the last stage of life. The book is a majestically ambitious attempt to isolate, define and synthesize a thousand years of attitudes about dying, burying, grieving and remembering. Ariès has burrowed through centuries of literature, folklore, religious history and civic and private documents. He has filled his eye with cemetery architecture, iconography, art and funeral kitsch. His conclusions: a millennium of living and dying in the West can be understood in five models...
...first, dating from the early Middle Ages, Ariès calls "the tame death," a calm acceptance of the end of life. He notes that in the Song of Roland and the Arthurian legends, heroes had premonitions of their deaths. In the final hour they prepared themselves with a simple, dignified ritual that reflected a world made whole by faith, community and a sense of common destiny. To die was to enter a long sleep until the day of resurrection...
...second model, "the death of the self," attempts to describe changes that Ariès believes began in the 11th century. The tightly woven tapestry of knights and monks gracefully facing their fate was attacked by the moths of individualism. The world became more worldly, and so did the otherworld. Ambitious men sought to preserve their identities beyond the grave. Hence the development of wills providing for memorial Masses and religious endowments that could be good investments in heaven...
...Ariès' story is one of decline, fall and trivialization. Through slow and elaborate psychological artifice, death loses respect. The rise of science and rationalism in the 17th and 18th centuries disrupted the traditional divine order and laid the basis for Model 3: "remote and imminent death." This is a bold construct in which the beliefs and rituals curbing natural behavior were breached. Sex and death, two of nature's most powerful expressions, were confused; the macabre became eroticized. Ariès illustrates this slippery thesis with Sade's tales of necrophilia...
...next transformations in death-style take place in the drawing rooms of the 19th century bourgeois family. Where once death aroused a pathos shared by a whole community, now the sense of privacy dominated thought and feeling. "Death," writes Ariès, "was no longer familiar and tame, as in traditional societies, but neither was it absolutely wild. It had become moving and beautiful like nature." Heaven, in turn, became a future home where one would be reunited with the dearly departed...