Epidemics have a way of making one wonder about death," biologist Aaron Hirsch notes, opening his timely new piece in the science magazine Nautilus with that galumphing truism.
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In his essay about sex, death and evolution, he says that we wonder, from our hearts, "WHY? Why on Earth does it have to be this way?"
We will come back to Hirsch later in this unusually funereal column. But his essay adds to your columnist's present preoccupation with necromatters. Cemeteries are much on my mind.
So, for example, as the tentacles of the Giant Squid of the ACT election campaign begin to reach out to Canberrans, I have received a flier from a candidate who lists as one of her achievements her successful fight against the expansion of the Woden Cemetery into that cemetery's adjoining park. Perhaps I am politically naive but a victory over the unenfranchised (and thus politically powerless) dead hardly seems a thing to boast about.
Also, I am cemetery-minded because I walk almost every day through the Woden Cemetery.
Cemeteries suit me. They are congenial, for the residents are, like me, shy, quiet and well-behaved. And now in these social-distancing times cemeteries are especially fine walking places for the avoiding of the dangerously alive with their propensities for sneezing, hugging and kissing.
Then, too, in these awful times my mind's eye is often at some cemeteries 19,000 kilometres away.
A migrant from England and still with strong ties to my English haunts, there are important graves in my "home" town I am used to reverently visiting.
Many Australians must, right now, be experiencing variations on this theme (in 2019, 30 per cent of the Australian population, or 7,529,570 people, were born overseas) including for some of us the sorrowing thought that because of the pandemic we may never again see haunts dear and important to us.
Perhaps, subconsciously, it is because this year's intended visits to English graves are impossible for me that, so as to be of some use to the dead, I am often respectfully in the cemetery at Woden.
Poignant and complex, how very like a miniature city it is, with its differing 'suburbs' of graves of different denominations, its well-to-do aspirational 'suburbs' of grand and glossy marble and its older more modest battlers' 'suburbs' of weathered concrete.
Coincidentally a fine cemetery-appreciating piece by Anthony Daniels, The Sincerity Of A Single Fresh Flower, has just popped up online.
Asking himself why he is attracted to cemeteries, Daniels muses that one reason is "There is, in a sense, no more egalitarian institution than a cemetery".
While some graves are more monumentally grand than others, "the fundamental condition of being the resident of a cemetery, namely being dead, is the same for everyone."
He appreciates, too, how the "wealth of grief and suffering" testified to by graves can remind us of how trivial our own little "daily irritations" are.
On Tuesday at the Woden Cemetery, my small daily irritations put into perspective, a chilly breeze made balloons bobble cheerfully and toy windmills whir playfully on children's graves. Suburbs of the dead stretched away to the near horizons.
What does it mean, all this death?
Religious explanations won't do for Hirsch. He thinks Charles Darwin got it "narrowly" right in his On the Origin of Species. In the book's last paragraph Darwin offers what Hirsch marvels is "this remarkable sentence".
"Thus," Darwin says "from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows."
And now, Hirsch explains, science knows what Darwin couldn't fully know "that the attributes we observe and admire in living creatures - precise adaptive fit to an environment, intricacy of construction, astonishing and diverse capabilities - are all built by a process that requires a certain quantity of death".
What Hirsch calls these "useful deaths" enable "beneficial mutations" owned by a man and a woman who have sex together (and thus pass these benefits on to their luckier children) to improve our ever-improving species.
"So we can conclude" Hirsch says, looking on the bright side of death, "that although the price of life is death, sex improves the exchange rate".
Perhaps, for those of us who in life always try to be useful, there is some slight consolation in this notion of our death's usefulness. Perhaps not.