A Skeleton in Black Rags

Newness is always coming into time. And death is always a novelty, of the most unexpected sort. It's odd, then, that death always feels to us like the oldest of the old, like something that entered human affairs at the very beginning of time and has aged pitilessly since then. In fact, in life, our dying begins once our genes have passed on, like the rats leaving the clipper. Really the figure of death should be emblematised as a naked new-born babe, and not that skeleton in black rags.