What are, in your opinion, the most perfect and significant deaths of literature? You can think either of a fictional character or a real one. For me, it's the death of Pasolini (1922-1975). Here's a an extract about it, that I translated from Italian:
>It was almost dawn of the Day of the Dead. Pier Paolo Pasolini thought it was a good day to die. Indeed, the only possible one. It was a special day, that November 2, 1975: a Sunday. Only once every six years Sunday coincides with the Day of the Dead. Pasolini "had to" die that day.
>Because on Sunday had died, in 1945, his brother Guido, two years younger than him, nationalist-inspired partisan murdered by communist guerrillas. And on Sunday, or a celebration day, die almost all the protagonists of his works.
>But Pasolini did not resign to die like any other man. He wanted to survive himself, as Dante, Shakespeare. Forgetfulness terrified him: "As soon as one has died, a quick summary of his just ended life is accomplished. A billion acts, expressions, sounds, voices, words: they fall into nothingness and only some of them survive. A huge number of sentences he said in all the mornings, the middays, the evenings and nights of his life, fall into an infinite and silent abyss.
>So he got himself killed. Not to give in to death that becomes a conspiracy of silence. What's more, he spent the last fifteen years of his life planning meticulously the how, the where, the when. He even left it written: "Killed with a stick." You just have to be able to read. [...]
>But where does it come from, this drive to end his days? Once again it's he himself to reveal it: "Either express oneself and die or remain unexpressed and immortal." And again, addressing himself, "Friuli bird" he says: "You will leave in a line of verse." That is: you die making poetry. Pasolini sees death as a beacon to retroactively illuminate his work and his life. But he does not intend to leave as a defeated one, passively. So it'is he, the victim, to choose his executioner.
>Pino Pelosi said the Frog. A boy of the world, with a criminal record. They knew each other. He picks up him in Piazza dei Cinquecento, Rome, and takes him to dinner. It's 00:45 when they get out of the restaurant Pomodoro. They stop in a soccer field in Ostia.
>Attacking first, Pasolini attempted to rape him with a wooden pole, an intolerable affront to the code of male prostitution, because the "boys of the world" are always active, never passive.
>The result is a fierce struggle. "He attacked me, I lost my head, I gave him a beating, I got in the car and while I was running away I unintentionally ran over him" said Pelosi. [...] Nothing was left to chance.
>Death, for Pasolini, was above all freedom. He writes in his Heretical Empiricism: "Freedom. I've been thinking a lot about this, and I understood that this mysterious word means nothing, finally, in the bottom of each fund, but freedom to choose death."
