Society created the prison in its own image; will history, with its penchant for paradox, reverse those roles?

Gracious dying is a huge, macabre and expensive joke on the American public.

Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged and neatly dressed - transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Where, indeed. Many a badly stung survivor, faced with the aftermath of some relative's funeral, has ruefully concluded that the victory has been won hands down by a funeral establishment - in disastrously unequal battle.

Society created the prison in its own image; will history, with its penchant for paradox, reverse those roles?

Knowing few children of my age with whom to compare notes, I envied the children of literature to whom interesting things were always happening.

It is somehow reassuring to discover that the word travel is derived from travail, denoting the pains of childbirth.