If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces

fragments on death after Anna de Noailles

Christina Tudor-Sideri

Forthcoming 30 April 2023

“the trembling metaphor of why we live, and how, and for how long, of how we strive for a good death, the kaleidoscopic haze of what remains on the path once we’ve shed our febrile skin in a miasmic atmosphere where everyone has been asleep for ages and the only sound a heart makes is that of the pen touching the page”

With lines from Les Vivants Et Les Morts by Anna de Noailles as preambles to its fragments, If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces is first and foremost a refusal of the modern tendency to exile death and the dying, but also an invitation to revisit the old Epicurean dictum: Death is nothing to us.

///

ISBN 978-1-916541-01-6