Pg. 220 of David Markson’s copy of Prophets Without Honour: Freud, Kafka, Einstein, and Their World by Frederic V. Grunfeld:
On which Markson translated the title of Chapter VII (“ULTIMA MULTIS”) as:
“(The last day for many)”
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On pg. 25 of This Is Not A Novel, Markson uses this chapter title (with an explanation as to its original source):
“On an ancient sundial in Ibiza: Ultima multis.
The last day for many.”
Though the phrase is supposedly from that ancient sundial in Ibiza, how it finds its way to us in modern times (and presumably to Markson) is through a mention in a passage in Walter Benjamin’s The Storyteller:
“And in the course of the nineteenth century, bourgeois society—by means of medical and social, private and public institutions—realized a secondary effect, which may have been its subconscious main purpose: to enable people to avoid the site of the dying. Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual, and a most exemplary one; think of the medieval pictures in which the deathbed has turned into a throne that people come toward through the wide-open doors of the dying person’s house. In the course of modern times, dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. It used to be that there was not a single house, hardly a single room, in which someone had not once died. (The Middle Ages also experienced spatially what makes the inscription Ultima multis—which adorns a sundial on Ibiza—significant as an expression of the time.)”
“Was Walter Benjamin the first to point out that where every home once possessed room after room in which people had died, in today’s world virtually everyone dies somewhere else?”
Asked Markson in Vanishing Point on pg. 83.
Ultima Multis.