Like others, he sensed death circling near.
As the conflict dragged on, Biafra buckled under a blockade so brutal it provoked an international outcry: mass starvation, kwashiorkor and mental illness devastated the Igbo landscape, where vultures, those "avian prognosticators of death", circled overhead.
"The Known World" begins with Henry Townsend's death, circles back into his varied and confounding life, and returns periodically to his death again, all the while touching on the lives of a dozen or so other characters, past and future, free and enslaved — every one of them painted with exquisite care, no matter how grievous their deeds or bankrupt their souls.
Individual lifelines (black) are aligned in the birth cohort direction, starting with birth (filled circle) at chronological age zero, and death (circled x).
But our life is two angels of death circling around each other constantly until one of them will have to die eventually.
Bradley, who's experienced ego death "a handful of times", made a thread on r/Psychonaut a couple of months ago called, "Does anyone else feel like there is a massive ego-death circle jerk on this [forum]?" "I made that because there were a lot of posts like, 'Took some mushrooms, felt everything was connected, was this ego death?'" he explains.
He whips the crowd into walls of death and circle pits, bellowing encouragement.
After Rūmī's death, his circle was institutionalized as the Mawlawiyyah order of Sufis, also known as the Mevlevis and often identified in the West as the "whirling dervishes".
In death, those circles are overlapping in surprising and sometimes contentious ways.
