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VOL. 02:1
Price:
$12.50
Parabola's Spring 1977 issue: Death In the twilight of an era, as in the twilight of an individual life, one's thoughts turn more and more to the dark ending and the doubtful question of another sunrise. We may be either morbidly obsessed with death, or searching for its meaning, and this meaning surely conditions, orients, limits to the finite or expands to the infinite the meaning of our life. Even if we choose the quest for meaning, it would be absurd to think that one mind, or one issue of a magazine, could do more than open some new questions; but this is perhaps not unimportant. When we search the scriptures, we find among them, again, traces of a sort of home base, hints of a common ground in a knowledge of the human and cosmic facts: facts which are hidden in mystery for the literalism of the intellect, and so an eternal source of argument and difference; yet the knowing of those facts is there present in the very marrow of our bones and flows in our in our bloodstream. The mind (or what we call the mind) cannot see beyond the logic of the opposing and mutually exclusive poles, the two ends of the line: life and death, good and bad, yes and no. It is only when the more organic perceptions join the mental vision that the "line" is seen for what it is: one surface of a many-dimensional whole. --from the editorial Focus Cover: The Aztec rock crystal skull of Mictlantecuhtli Musée de l'Homme, Paris In this issue:
"Fear No More the Heat of the Sun" by P. L. Travers
- The celebrated storyteller's refreshing and insightful meditation--prompted by a visit to London's Brompton graveyard--on childhood, age, and mortality
"Swimming in the Ocean of becoming" by Conrad Hyers
- A lively account of the Zen perspective on death, a present-centered liberation from fear and clinging that is often expressed in joking and laughter
"Sabbath in Gehenna" by Isaac Bashevis Singer
- A story about a day of rest in hell and the sinners' heated discussion of how to improve their lot: a failed manifesto of sinners' lib
"Learning to Die" by Brother David Steindl-Rast
- How and why we must learn to die if we are to be fully alive, in rhythm with the natural ebb and flow of existence
"The Nature of Death"
- A sampling of the great traditional teachings about death, presented with an eye toward their insights into a common truth
"Faces of Death" by William G. Doty
- A brief indication, from an anthropological perspective, of the variety of ways in which peoples have regarded and coped with the fact of death
"Irish Wake, Catholic Funeral, U.S.A." by William Corcoran Burke, Jr.
- This personal account of a death in an American family opens our eyes to the rituals of death that occur every day in our midst
"The Diamond Vehicle: Conversations on Tibetan Buddhism and the West"
- Two Tibetan lamas share their knowledge of the nature of life and of the passage in death, and the American Vajrayana Buddhist Robert Thurman discusses the teaching of Tibetan Buddhism and its mission in the West
Tangents - Reviews
"Immortality--More than Intimations?" by John Loudon
Epicycles - Traditional stories from around the world
"The Death of Adam" / Jewish retold by Howard Schwartz
