Word: ary
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Death, Philippe Ariès ∙Lucy...
...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...
This sentimental optimism in what Ariès calls "the death of the other" hardened into "the invisible death." The end of life is treated as an obscenity; physicians prevaricate with fatally ill patients; the afflicted die alone, plugged into the engines of Hygeia; emotional and public grieving is thought to be in bad taste...
...heavy silence has fallen over the subject," concludes Ariès. "When this silence is broken, as it sometimes is in America today, it is to reduce death to the insignificance of an ordinary event that is mentioned with feigned indifference. Either way, the result is the same: neither the individual nor the community is strong enough to recognize the existence of death...