Thursday, January 23, 2025

Unmarked Death

 It took me a long time to realized the burden of last few lines of  Leo Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich

And suddenly it became clear to him that what was tormenting him and would not be resolved was suddenly all resolved at Ollce, on two sides, on ten sides, on all sides. He was sorry for them, he had to act so that it was not painful for them. To deliver them and deliver himself from these sufferings. "How good and how simple," he thought.

{Leo Tolstoy died from pneumonia, aged eighty-two, at the railway station of Astapovo, a remote Russian village, on November 7, 1910. He had left his family home on October 28, in the middle of the night, to die as unmarked person}


Or, why  Thomas Hardy in The Mayor of Casterbridge quoted: 

 Michael Henchard's Will 

That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, 
or made to grieve on account of me. 
& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground. 
& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. 
& that nobody is wished to see my dead body. 
& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral. 
& that no flours be planted on my grave. 
& that no man remember me. 

To this I put my name. 
Michael Henchard


Or Ghalib said: 

hue mar ke ham jo rusvā  hue kyuuñ na ġharq-e-dariyā
na  kabhī  janāza  uThtā   na  kahīñ  mazār  hotā

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