The World as an Institute

In August 1990, the recently retired Dutch ethnologist Johannes Jacobus Voskuil had a dream: he lay in his coffin and was carried to his grave while a song he had heard hundreds of times — Sidney Bechet’s rendition of “Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out” — played in the background. He heard the crunch of gravel under the pallbearers’ feet. After a while, the soft swaying over others’ shoulders stopped, and he felt himself being lowered to the ground. As faint murmurs arose, and the footfalls died away, he lifted the lid of his coffin and sat up to watch the attendees depart. Those at the tail of the funeral train he didn’t know; those at the head were now too far away to recognize. Lying back, letting the lid settle over him again, he remained awake, “overwhelmed by a feeling of limitless sorrow.” 

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