Birthday meditation on death

Once in a while it’s good to reflect on your own mortality. What better time than your birthday?

Roman sarcophagus, 220-230 CE, detail. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, photo by the Author.

week it was my birthday. N. 59, to be precise. I’ll soon have to think of something special to celebrate the big 6-0, as obviously arbitrary as that number actually is. (We ten-fingered primates are obsessed with base ten counting, though I must admit the decimal system is awfully convenient.)

This year, though, I decided to take a stroll with my wife in the beautiful Greco-Roman galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where we live. It’s not that we hadn’t had enough exposure to that sort of thing of late, as we had just come back from a ten-day trip to Rome. It’s that Greco-Roman statuaries (and buildings) are some of the things that trigger a feeling of awe in me (together with certain pieces of music, some examples of architecture, some novels, and pretty much every astronomy photo ever).

On that day, however, I wasn’t looking for the obvious. The bust of Marcus Aurelius, say. Or those of Socrates and Epicurus. Or Homer. Nor was I attracted by the incredible frescos that once decorated a Roman villa, or by the Etruscan chariot on display on the mezzanine. What I wanted instead was to contemplate the faces of ordinary Greco-Roman men, women, boys, and girls, like this one, for instance:

Head of a man, Roman, 1st century BCE. Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by the Author.