Over at The Critic, our skeptical doctor recounts going on his daily permitted walk in Paris recently and happening upon an undertaker’s shop near a cemetery.

An undertaker’s window need not and should not be a page out of a pathology textbook. But representing death as a kind of pleasant afternoon outing or social occasion surely does not make for a mature attitude to death, which after all remains, despite a great deal of technical progress, the bourn from which no traveller returns.