Viewing Life from Death's Door: 'The Black Mirror' - Raymond Tallis

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marjoram_blues
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Viewing Life from Death's Door: 'The Black Mirror' - Raymond Tallis

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Edinburgh International Book Festival 15-31 August 2015

Susana Moreira Marques & Raymond Tallis
Tue 25 Aug 2:00pm - 3:00pm
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festiv ... ond-tallis

Viewing Life from Death’s Door

Based in Lisbon, Susana Moreira Marques is fascinated by Portuguese attitudes to mortality. In 'Now and at the Hour of Our Death' she tells the stories of those who work with and live closely to terminal cancer patients.

Writer and former doctor Raymond Tallis takes a look at life, but reflecting backwards from the standpoint of death. As he explains in 'The Black Mirror', his aim is to shed more light on the meaning of existence.

The Black Mirror - Raymond Tallis
RRP: £17.99. Published by: Atlantic Books - 02 Jul 2015
Inspired by E. M. Forster's thought that 'Death destroys a man but the idea of it saves him', The Black Mirror takes death as an external viewpoint from which we may see our lives more clearly.
Raymond Tallis looks back on his world from the standpoint of his future corpse. He reflects on the senses that opened up his late world, the elements they reveal, the distances, divisions and intimacies of space, the multifarious activities that occupied his days, his possessions, his utterances, his relationship to others, the extinguished flame that was his self, his journey towards the end, and his after-life either side of the grave.
About the author
Raymond Tallis trained as a doctor before going on to become Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester. He was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences for his research in clinical neuroscience. He retired from medicine in 2006 to become a full-time writer and has written over a dozen books including, most recently, The Kingdom of Infinite Space, Michelangelo's Finger, Aping Mankind and In Defence of Wonder. In 2009, The Economist's Intelligent Life magazine named him as one of the top living polymaths in the world.
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