Sunday, 29 March 2015

This is my first post in this blog. And is there a more unique way to Begin something than beginning with the finem ultimum, the Ultimate End : Death !?

Death Inspires Me 
Death inspires me! ( a piece by me)


Because I could not stop for Death –  He kindly stopped for me –   The Carriage held but just Ourselves –   And Immortality.
                                                                                               -Emily Dickinson



Death inspires many but so much?.. that they start practicing their last words even before they are dead just to leave behind an impeccable mark on the society? (You don't wanna die not knowing what to say at the very last moment of your physical existence and transcend to the metaphysical, if of-course there exists anything like metaphysical world or some abstract dimension. We never stop hoping for a better-than-this-earth kind of close-to-Heaven abstract place where we might go after our death, do we?)

Worry not if you are one among the many who want to leave an impeccable mark by tour last one-liner:
Here I have a list of popular "last words" for you to go through to help you construct one of your own.
In case, you are not one of those who worry about their last words then get ready to be stupefied by the last words coming up that'll leave you thinking.


Can you be Sarcastic while dying? Unthinkable? Read these:


1. “Hey fellas! How about this for a headline for tomorrow’s paper? French Fries!”
- uttered by James Donald French who was sentenced to death by electrocution (electric chair) sitting on the chair addressing the journalists who were there to witness his execution on behalf of the press.

2. "My fun days are over."
- said James Dean (1931-1955) right before his fatal car crash.

3."Hold it! Hold it! Don't get excited. Let's cool it, brothers."
 - According to Epilogue to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Haley.


(He was shot 16 times right after he said the above words to his assassins. What's funny is: Shalom Auslander in his book Hope A Tragedy remarked : "Perhaps they had cooled it...Perhaps they’d been planning on shooting him twenty times. It behooves the victim, in these matters, to be specific.")


However some of the last words are rather serious in nature which requires deeper understanding:


1. “These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice and treason.
- A speech by Salvador Allende who gave his last words in the presence of the military forces who broke into the La Moneda Palace on September 3, 1973 as an attempt to declare coup d’etat. Right after he delivered his legendary speech before his fellow military men, he took everyone by surprise when he got a gun out of his garb and shot himself in the head.


2. “I pray you to bear me witness that I meet my fate like a brave man.”
-Major John Andre was sentenced to die of execution before the judicial court of America after he was proven guilty of being a British spy. In an account of the revolution written by James Thatcher, he recounted that the moment before he was hanged, Andre was given the chance to pronounce his last words before his fellowmen. As a response, he uttered “I pray you to bear me witness that I meet my fate like a brave man” as he raised the white handkerchief tied around his head to cover his eyes.

3. “Please don’t let me fall.”
The first woman to have ever been executed by the military tribunal of the federal government of the United States, Mary Elizabeth Jenkins Surratt uttered these last words as she was being executed in public on July 7, 1865. A boarding house owner, she was sentenced to be hanged after being found guilty of treason. She was also involved in an apparent conspiracy to assassinate the late US president Abraham Lincoln.


Some last words turn out to be Grand:


1. "I die happy."

- Charles James Fox (1749-1806)



2. “I’m going away tonight.”
-These were the last five words uttered by James Brown.


3."Mozart"
-Composer Gustav Mahler died in bed, conducting an imaginary orchestra.


4. “Tomorrow, at sunrise, I shall no longer be here.”
-Nostradamus predicted. He was right.


5. “I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.”
-Leonardo da Vinci being overly modest.
(Why? Mona Lisa isn' good enough?)


6. “I don’t know what I may seem to the world. But as to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
- Sir Issac Newton


7. "Hē Ram", which may be translated as "Oh God".
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.