Laudator Temporis Acti

Leslie Mitchell, Maurice Bowra: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 302, with notes on p. 364:

In the late 1950s, he was despatched to a nursing home to be nursed through a bout of influenza. A bachelor, with no family to care for him, he had no choice in the matter. But it was an unpleasant foretaste of what was to come: 'To parody a great man—Ah the sweat and the stink and the expense. All that washing of one's arse by elderly nurses and those bed pans ... Not again for me. Better a quiet ending and a good end to the long, cloudy day.'⁹³ When an elderly don collapsed in the street, Maurice rather envied his clean break with life: 'Dear Dawkins died very nicely in front of this college. He fell down in the street and was off to eternity ... A nice end, and may I have one like it.'⁹⁴

93. C.M. Bowra to P. Hadley, 10 Dec. [1958/9]; Bowra MSS.
94. Idem to N. Annan, 12 June [1955]; King’s Coll., Cambridge, Annan MSS.

Id., p. 307, with notes on p. 366:

Maurice died suddenly on 2 July 1971. He had suffered a massive heart attack, and this was exactly what he had hoped for. Of course, death was a fearsome thing, and 'most men shrank from asking what death really means, and to think of it too precisely is to feel the reason unseated ... the very essence of its terror ... is precisely that it cannot be understood or imagined, and therefore cannot be faced'.¹³² But, in Maurice's view, 'death is all right but not to be bed-ridden and gaga for years'.¹³³ What terrified him was the idea that he might witness the slow disintegration of his mental and physical powers, even becoming helpless.

132. C.M. Bowra, Inspiration and Poetry (London, 1955), 257.
133. Idem to C. Connolly, 17 May 1970; Connolly MSS.