Memento Mori

The grave ’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

More from my afternoon at Lakewood Cemetery, and my first color roll through the reversed-lens Hawkeye.

I wish that I had the Hawkeye 16 years ago, when I went to Highgate Cemetery in London. At the time I was a Trotskyite anarcho-syndicalist with Romantic leanings, so it started as a pilgrimage to Karl Marx’s grave. But the Romantic side of me quickly took over when I saw all those weeping angels and empty chairs and clinging vines on the old side of the cemetery; the modernist bust of Herr Doktor Marx on the new side was lacking in all manner of charm, like a socialist realist poster among pre-Raphaelite paintings (or Julia Margaret Cameron photographs, though I’d yet to discover her). If I ever go back, I’ll bring the Hawkeye along, plus a few rolls of Agfa 100, and make up for the lost opportunity.