Wine and Desire and Death

The Dutch painters of the Golden Age knew ...

Everything in our lives comes with an expiration date, and that includes you and me and everyone we know. The theme of mutability permeates literature and philosophy through the ages, from the Old Testament book of “Ecclesiastes” — “To everything there is a season” — to the Elizabethan essayist Francis Bacon, who wrote, “It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other,” to the thoughtful bumper sticker we used to see on Volkswagen buses in the 1970s, “Life’s a beach, then you die.”