The Fall of a Sparrow

For many years now, I have made my summer office on the secluded patio of a Calgary tea house. It’s an unlikely gem: Hidden away in a back alley, it has bare wooden benches, and is framed by a simple pergola with a corrugated plastic roof for rain cover. Green ash trees shield the sightlines from the alley, helped by the recent addition of flower and herb boxes. In the wall behind my table is a little hollow where a family of sparrows has made its nest. Watching the sparrows arrive to feed their nestlings over my shoulder is one of the small joys of the place, but it happens so frequently that I pay it little attention. That’s probably why I didn’t initially notice when a magpie flew into the patio and tore a chick from its nest. (Magpies, for readers in eastern North America, are an iridescent black and white corvid, larger than a blue jay but smaller than a crow. They are prolific in my city, and unnervingly clever, being one of the few non-mammalian species that can recognize itself in a mirror.) 

It set the nestling down a few feet from me, pinning it to the ground and pecking curiously at it. I did the obvious thing and shooed the magpie away, wrapped the chick in a paper napkin, and returned it to its nestmates. For the next three hours, the magpie returned two dozen times, perching menacingly on a flower box opposite me and eying the nest. I menaced back, standing on the benches armed with a broomstick. 

The battle distracted me from the task I had set for myself, which was to write about the modern world’s increasingly disordered relationship with mortality. I was going to argue that we no longer experience death as a necessary part of life, and so are losing our ability to meet it with dignity, courage, or acceptance. As if to prove the point, I spent my afternoon waving and cursing at a magpie, hoping by force of will to prevent the death of a sparrow. When I returned to the patio a week later, the three sparrow nestlings were gone and presumed eaten. I may have delayed their deaths by a few hours, but I was only forestalling the inevitable. 

In the industrialized and post-industrial world, death usually arrives late. At the turn of the twentieth century in America, one in ten children would not live to see their first birthday. In the few decades that followed, infant mortality plummeted by over 90 percent, with corresponding declines in maternal mortality of almost 99 percent. A young man born in the West is now significantly more likely to die from a self-inflicted injury than he is to die in armed conflict (the twenty-year war in Afghanistan, for example, cost fewer than 2,500 American lives). We are two or three generations removed from mass casualty events like famines or deadly zoonotic plagues (the Covid pandemic was comparably mild). And when death does finally extend its hand to us, it does so quietly and out of sight. In the United States, 80 percent of deaths are confined to hospitals and long-term or acute care centers, rather than in the home. Even animal deaths are hidden from view: We buy the shrink-wrapped meat of creatures whose faces we have never seen. Mortality remains an inescapable fact, but it has been tamed, sanitized, and banished to the margins of our consciousness. 

That fewer young people die in childbirth or in war is an obvious blessing; the unnecessary or preventable loss of life is always a tragedy. But its banishment has consequences. Awareness of death humbles us in our vanity, our hubris, and our contempt for others, and it dispels any illusions that we are in control of our fates. Advances in medical technology have allowed us to extend lives, but no matter how great our ambition, will, or ingenuity, death is the sign that we can never escape from our ultimate dependence. 

Viewing life sub specie mortis, we are made to recall that all our worldly ambitions are doomed to a final frustration, and all our power and social status and achievements mere vapors. The awareness of death forces us into confrontation with the questions of ultimate concern: How should we live? For what were we created? Where do we go, after our journey in this world is complete, and how can we prepare ourselves well for the next? Since we must die, what should we endeavor to leave behind? A legacy of good or beautiful works? Children, through whom we hope to secure some measure of attenuated immortality? These are the questions that we all must ask if we hope to live a serious life. We all know of the negative correlation between a country’s fertility rate and its degree of industrial advancement. There may be a further correlation between forgetting that we will die and forgetting to leave behind children.  

By removing death from view, we have made the metaphysical questions it engenders meaningless. To speak publicly about the existence of the immortal soul, or the nature of the afterlife and our preparation for it, is now seen as quixotic and probably suspect. The only reality that can now be admitted is the one that corresponds to material reality—to those things that can be seen and touched, measured and quantified. As the sociologist Peter Berger describes it, by closing our eyes to eternity, “the reality of a middle-aged businessman drowsily digesting his lunch is elevated to the status of final philosophical authority. All questions that do not correspond to this reality are ruled to be inadmissible. The denial of metaphysics may here be identified with the triumph of triviality.” 

Without death, the meaning of life must be found in the here and now: in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain in this immanent world. We forget that this place, or our place in it, is merely transitory. In the eighth century, English monastic St. Bede recorded a parable of a sparrow, which he attributed to a counselor of King Edwin of Northumbria: 

The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall. . . . The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.

The forgetting of death has also led some of us to imagine that mortality and human fragility can be defeated through scientific and technological advancements. In the field of nanotechnology, scientists have been exploring means to (in theory at least) artificially oxygenate the blood to combat respiratory or cardiac disease, repair damaged cells, heal scar tissue, and effectively halt or reverse the aging process. A select number of the super-rich have embraced vampirism, harvesting and filling themselves with the blood of the young. Transhumanists dream of digitizing a person’s memories and consciousness and uploading them to a machine to “live” there forever. It’s a sad perversion of the (heretical) aspiration to find the secret knowledge to transcend our earth-bound existence: Whereas the ancient Gnostics sought to escape from a corrupt material reality to unite with God, the modern ones would supplant God entirely by bringing life and death under their dominion. The modern transhumanists cannot even explain why they want life everlasting. Their goal, I expect, is simple power: “If there were gods, how could I endure not being a god?” speaks Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. 

Mortality must be defeated because it is an intolerable symbol of our finitude. And if it cannot be defeated, then it must at least be hidden, sanitized, managed. The mass hysteria that accompanied Covid exposed our collective inability to accept that suffering, uncertainty, and death are inescapable realities. The increasingly dystopian euthanasia regime in my own country, and the sacralization of abortion, are further examples of our refusal to cede the illusion that we are sovereign over life and death; we must insist that these are matters of “choice.”

For my part, the idea that there is no authority above man’s would be terrifying. Anyone who places their ultimate hope in human beings must not know many. But thinking back to my doomed battle against the magpie, there is consolation in Hamlet’s statement that “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” 

If we can recall our dependence, then we may yet have reason to hope.