That happened Saturday. In a similar event, on Friday, "Visitor Killed by Roof Debris at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West/A 55-year-old rector from a university in Brazil was killed while on a walking tour of the famed architect’s winter home in Scottsdale, Ariz." (NYT).
A question I asked Grok: What are some other incidents of a person getting killed by an object that has some ironic significance? On my own, I only thought of [that character I falsely remember as having been played by] Daniel Day-Lewis in "Howard's End."
Reading this, you may wonder, am I spending my time well? Death is right there walking beside you, ready to take you out when the time is right.
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Nel nome del Padre, del Figlio e dello Spirito Santo
I couldn't help but remember the time Boy George was almost killed by a falling disco ball.
“It would have been both ironic and glamorous to be finished off by a four-foot glitter ball,” George told the Sun afterward.
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/boy-george-nearly-killed-by-giant-disco-ball/
"Not me. No, no, not me! Lend me your horse. I will go to Samarra where death cannot find me."
I've been out to Taliesen West a couple times. Wright was a brilliant architect, but a lousy engineer.
only grizzly man comes to mind. is a bear an object?
Planned Personhood is Her Choice.
Daniel Day Lewis wasn't in Howards End. If you're thinking of Leonard Bast, that was Samuel West. EM Forster was fond of sudden and "symbolic" deaths.
Is anyone more overrated than Wright? His flat leaky roofs and unlivable houses.
It's a 'Mr. Death' or something. He's come about the reaping? I don't think we need any at the moment.
Age brings us to a better reckoning of the time we may still receive. I have dropped some social events that were not meaningful to me, a semi-gregarious introvert. Almost anything else I do with those times is better than the mere mingling and small talk. Time spent with God is certainly more meaningful -- whether that comes in prayer or in walking the fields. Sometimes he is more reliably out in those fields, or the woods beyond. At the risk of sounding sanctimonious, reading the Bible with others, and being a part of their prayers, and they a part of ours, is particularly good fellowship. Great time if you can find it.
They say Wright's roofs leak. Much of what he designed was intended to look good, not to fit human contours and abilities or engineering specifications. The Guggenheim isn't the best design for a museum either. That doesn't mean that tearing down his buildings is justified.
Iris Murdoch, also in love with sudden and symbolic deaths, did have a character killed by a falling cross. No, wait ... it was a character in a novel that a character in her novel who was in love with sudden and symbolic deaths wrote that died. Transitory alexic mise en abyme.
+1 to Bob. Wright designed buildings to aggrandize his own artistic vision, not for the comfort, convenience, or safety of the people who would have to live there. If you want to be a fine artist, be a painter or something. Also, the irony in the first priest's death by crucifix is clear, but not quite sure I get the irony in the priest's death by roof debris.
God wanted to talk to that priest real bad.
But for the “some” times Molinari’s quote was apt. Quality time with God is what Christian and Jewish believers seek, not always with vigor. Sounds like God wanted Molinari’s company.
Let’s stir the pot a bit:
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder.
Why Anthony Jeselnik's girlfriend is no longer religious
Kai Akker said...
Time spent with God is certainly more meaningful -- whether that comes in prayer or in walking the fields. Sometimes he is more reliably out in those fields, or the woods beyond.
Out past the corn fields
Where the wood got heavy
Out in the back seat
Of my '60 Chevy...
Bob Seger- Night Moves
Damien Omen VII: The Clocking of the Catholic
"Death is right there walking beside you, ready to take you out when the time is right. "... just figured that out? Eh?
Louvre has a whole area dedicated to FLW. While visiting my husband & I were saying how it was crazy that we lived in Madison, never went to Spring Green when we lived so close.
35 years later still never gone.
“Louvre has a whole area dedicated to FLW. While visiting my husband & I were saying how it was crazy that we lived in Madison, never went to Spring Green when we lived so close.”
Me too. I had good intentions of going there once, but decided to go to House on the Rock instead. I think I made the right choice.
Roof deaths are increasing.
People who live the longest are the ones who don’t give a shit about what death has planned for them. There are lots of people around who have not died, don’t be pessimistic.
I remember the old baudy WC Fields joke, well, he died doing what he loved the most.
“ Daniel Day Lewis wasn't in Howards End. If you're thinking of Leonard Bast, that was Samuel West. EM Forster was fond of sudden and "symbolic" deaths.”
You are right I’m thinking of his character in a room with a view. will correct
I’ve been to Atlantic City hundred times. I’ve never seen Death walking on the beach.
“I get the irony in the priest's death by roof debris.”
It’s not so much that he was a priest, but that he was an admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright and something was amiss in the structure of the building such that he got killed by the deficiencies that might be attributable to the man he admired.
But of course, the priest killed by a crucifix is more ironic.
Taliesin West is well worth a visit. Wright may have been impractical, but those buildings are lovely.
“ "Death is right there walking beside you, ready to take you out when the time is right. "... just figured that out? Eh?”
I used to picture death walking somewhere on the face of the Earth toward me and destined ultimately to meet up with me but at some distance that I couldn’t know. It could take a long time if he was over there in Siberia, perhaps, but who knows, he could be in northern Wisconsin by now.
That way, the event is destined to happen at a certain time, but you can’t figure out when it is.
But if you picture Death walking beside you, death is less of a spooky enemy and more of a companion. Now there’s nothing about the image that speaks to the timing of the event.
These are two very different visualizations. .
I wouldn't mind seeing a SpaceX satellite fall out of the sky and crush House Foreign Affairs ranking member Rep. Greg Meeks. That would be ironic.
"Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me."
-- Emily Dickinson
"I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid."
-- T.S. Eliot
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”
-- I Corinthians15:55
It's like the Meet Joe Black scene where he's talking to the Jamaican woman in patois.
“Death is right there walking beside you, ready to take you out when the time is right.”
Reminds of the line about sin in Genesis. God warns Cain: “Sin croucheth at the door.” But unlike death, which can only be delayed, sin can be overcome.
Finally I have a good excuse to avoid church. It's too dangerous.
"Death is right there walking beside you, ready to take you out when the time is right."
When death is seriously stalking you, it changes your perspective on life. I always tried not to think too much about death....until I had to last year. After death let me go, as weird as it sounds, life became so much better for me.
"Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me." - Emily Dickinson
Long time reader from Guayaquil. Is this the first time my city is mentioned in your blog? Such sad story.
““Death is right there walking beside you, ready to take you out when the time is right.”
I thought of Meet Joe Black too. Anthony Hopkins has to keep his constant companion Joe entertained; when Joe gets bored he’s going to pull the plug.
My husband was eating at a restaurant outside of Denver when he left the table for the restroom. While he was gone, the elk mount hanging high above his seat came crashing down. Fortunately, it was not his time.
Blake Champlin, a Tulsa, Oklahoma, environmental lawyer and activist (Sierra Club, Save the Illinois River, Keep Tulsa Beautiful, environmental law work including cases against poultry companies). He died at home when a tree supporting his hammock fell and crushed him. He was regionally active but not nationally well-known in the same way.
Brother Rogério Renato Mateucci, the rector of Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná in Brazil, was not a Priest.
If the good priest died in such a way in the Middle Ages, he might have been refused burial in consecrated ground. God was certainly in a hurry to call him home.
*People who live the longest are the ones who don’t give a shit about what death has planned for them.*
In mid-February, 2020 we were out to dinner with close friends. Someone brought up this new 'coronavirus' thing that was just starting to gain traction.
My response? "If I catch it and die, I catch it and die."
Being afraid of dying is a terrible way to live ... as the next two years showed us.
"But if you picture Death walking beside you, death is less of a spooky enemy and more of a companion."
I agree. As I may have posted earlier, I am just 2 years younger than our host, and Death walks beside me every day. Part of me fears death, or at least causes me anxiety, because it is the great unknown. But I take some comfort in studying the great Christian theologians. I'm still studying John Calvin's "Institutes of the Christian Religion," and other religious texts, so I am really trying to understand what happens when we die, and what we must do in order to be saved.
Yes, death is always one step a way. But whatyagonnado?
Who the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. But we can't all be sitting around thinking about death. So, somebody dies and we move on (unless its our kid, our spouse, etc.). They bought the farm. End of line. They didn't make it. Curtains for him. Sads.
Here today, gone tommorrow. But as the poem goes, cry and you cry alone.
We are all "dead men walking" - no matter what the age.
I've been lucky. Like most 'muricans I've know friends relatives who've died. But usually of some disease, at a relatively old age.
But I've often been in "almost" car accidents. Where one second and litterally 3 feet meant the difference between life and death. Once, a 75 lbs. spool of barbed wire bounced out of the back of someone's pickup truch and missed me by six inches. And i've had heavy weights miss me by six inches when I was a kid. Like a bugs bunny cartoon - only real life.
Reaction? Shock. "Wow, that was a close one". Then back to normal life. What's for dinner?
The good thing about Judaism is there are no "graven images". Its just bare walls. No beauty. No art. Just a big zero.
But no deadly accidents either. No Rabbi was ever killed by falling religious symbol.
More pedantry, one irrelevant, one relevant:
- Many universities outside the US have an administrative and completely non-religious position called the Rector. Exact duties vary from place to place. The Scottish universities' rectors are more like ombudsmen or "visitors," for example. The name must derive from universities' original purpose as seminaries. The departed Brazilian Rector, at a Catholic school, just happened to be a clergyman.
- The Brazilian Rector was hit and killed by a piece of acrylic roofing protection. Don't think that was an original FLW ingredient. I suppose it was put there to protect his leaky-ass roof, but still, I think that severs the causation between FLW and the departed brother. CC, JSM
"Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
John Donne never met scum like Lindsey Graham or the current crop of Killer-Clowns in the US Congress. Why that crazy Trump is trying to stop the Ukraine-Russia war. What is he, somekinda Putin lover?
We need to keep that war going and kill ruskiees. Mitt Romney just tweeted that. Y'know the clown that wants to live to 120 (per his biography) and has never had a family member fight in a USA war (yes, even WW 2).
Some powerful people think "Dying is for other people". At least Lindsey graham found out differently.
Ocean: "No Rabbi was ever killed by falling religious symbol."
Well, synagogues have chandeliers. And some of the megillot can get pretty big and heavy. Big prayer shawls are a tripping hazard. I'm sure there have been some strange synagogue deaths.
(burning alive in the shul while your tormentors stand outside the doors they nailed shut, with machine guns ready to mow down anyone who does get out, on the other hand, is regrettably quite commonplace.)
CC, JSM
One could misquote Mark Twain and say:
People talk about death, but no does anything about it.
This topic comes up in the Netflix doc "Norm, The tale of Norm Macdonald." He kept his cancer diagnosis secret. And in the meantime pined it for comedic material, and when the subject came up in interviews, he would talk about death as though it was not knocking at his door yet.
His often go to phrase "I didn't know he was sick", when somebody's death was commented to him, took an ironic twist once people found out he was "battling cancer for 9 years".
You may find some of the praise heaped upon him a little over the top. But if you followed his career (since his big break at SNL) as I did, I thought the doc was understated.
Sure John. let no one say synagogues aren't as lovely as Notre Dame Cathedral. Judaism is only different from Christianity when its better.
BTW, i was tempted to substitute Islam for Judaism. But I wanted to test the reaction. And sure enough...
Yep. Norm was a class act from beginning to end. He must have looked on with horror at Christopher Hitchens "Cancer pity party".
A lot of synagogues are built in the same styles as churches. No cruciform floor plan, of course, but domes, arches, rose windows, etc. CC, JSM
Once you eliminate 3-d sculpture, though, you do cut down on safety risks. A Greek Orthodox priest would have to have the entire iconostasis fall on him, for example. And even then he might get lucky and be right in the Holy Doorway, Buster Keaton-style. CC, JSM
He was delivering a message about the fragility and the unpredictability of life. I would say this definitely drove that message home.
To say that there is no fun in death is to reject the literature of two thousand years.
In Walpole’s CASTLE OF OTRANTO, some poor kid gets squashed by a giant falling helmet that came from a statue of St Alfonso the Good. Totally out of the blue. Hilarious!
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