He had administered it to his brother Tom, when the latter was dying of TB, which also killed Keats’s mother. Death is one of the three thing in life I have found you can’t hire a proxy or stand-in for – childbirth, writing your own novel, and death. I used to describe death as “the fly in the cosmic ointment”. A second is our capacity to live with death, and, indeed, to disbelieve at an emotional level in our own inescapable and unarguable deaths. In terms of the universe, we deserve all of our death sentences, even if we’re pleased if they come late.

Source: The Guardian November 10, 2017 21:45 UTC