For someone who, like me, aspires to pass on to posterity as an upa literati, places of birth and passing are important. In the first case there is not much to do. You are born where you are born and there is no way to alter this fact. In my case, the place is Barcelona. So that on Wikipedia what is recorded, and will be recorded, is: “Barcelona, ??1952”.
This being irreversible, the only way to be creative is to find a good place of death. When someone dies and people don’t remember much about who they were, the first thing they do is look up their name on Wiki. If it states that this gentleman born in Barcelona has also stretched his paw in Barcelona, ??the impression is, I don’t know, a little poor. As if he didn’t know how to fly beyond the municipal limits.
Berlin would be nice. It is a city with a sonorous name, full of history. But Rome and Naples are also full of history and, perhaps because they are predictable, they don’t really interest me. If we stick to Italian toponymy, Parma would be fine. I’ve been in love with it since the first time I went there. But immediately there would be those who, in a hurry, would read Palma instead of Parma, and it wouldn’t be the same.
Vázquez Montalbán got it right with Bangkok. Having been born in Barcelona, ??on his way back from a trip to Australia – where he had gone to give conferences -, while waiting to connect with another plane, he had a cardiac arrest at the airport. That is why, in the encyclopedias, its entry states: “Barcelona, ??1939 – Bangkok, 2003”.
From -ok to -ok, Vladivostok would be cool. It is at the other end of Eurasia, next to Korea. Molaria But, of course, if you make the whole trip there (with the Trans-Siberian, for example) and you get there and spend a few weeks and a few months and don’t die, it will have been a useless journey, which will not have served your purpose, unless you decide to remedy it yourself and amortize in this way the costs invested in the trip.
