To set the tone the opening concert was devoted to Mozart's Symphony No. 40 — not about death, but composed near the end of Mozart's life, and in a minor key — and Mahler's elegiac quasi symphony, "Das Lied von der Erde". Louis Langrée, the festival's music director, was on the podium, and he appeared not to be taking the mortality theme too seriously.
I would have liked more on the mortality theme, on how classical music alerted him to what he called "the astounding pleasure of being alive on the astounding verge of not being", but it was an altogether engaging 20 minutes inside a mind that grows more curious as it grows older.
But suddenly and unaccountably, here is "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," a big-budget studio film, set to open Christmas Day, whose central theme is human mortality, a theme the film explores using the same special effects technology, now extended into the digital realm, that American movies have used for so long to keep us trapped in perpetual childhood.
In writing the script for "Subway", Yoshimura wanted the Pembleton character to be confronted with his own mortality, a theme that had continued from the previous season where the character suffered a stroke.
But darkness is always lurking, even in the midday sun, and big themes — mortality, mayhem, domination, power — are never far away.
Here monumental characters interact in fateful ways while the author deftly explores some of literature's ageless themes: mortality, betrayal, heroism and hubris.
He's still preoccupied with mortality and renewal, themes he was pretty much consigned to with his accidental fatal shooting of his brother at the age of 12, followed not long after by the death of his mother.
Fellow Scottish novelist Ewan Morrison, who writes in Standard English about middle-class Gen X-ers, agrees: "What I really like about Welsh is that, after Trainspotting, you didn't have to try to pretend that you were writing high literature, flagging up big themes: mortality and timelessness, love and loss, all that baby boomer pish.
The retrospective is divided into three sections: autobiographical sculptures that narrate our collective memory; a room of botanical sculptures in which fertility and mortality are central themes; and his most recent work, a series of portraits inspired by Haarlem's 17th-century tulip mania and its relationship to the state of our contemporary economy.
If mortality was the theme of the show, then its symbol was the toupee, that magic, carpet known as the Holly wood Rug.
