麻豆社

A Nobel-winning professor, an elderly clergyman and a boy scout were in a plummeting helicopter, only two parachutes between them. The academic seized a package, said he was the cleverest man in the world and jumped.

鈥淢y child,鈥� the priest said, 鈥淚鈥檝e lived long and I鈥檓 going to Heaven. You take the other.鈥�

鈥淐hill,鈥� said the boy. 鈥淭he cleverest man in the world just jumped out with my rucksack.鈥�

How can we possibly weigh one life against another? Already there鈥檚 talk of focusing facilities on the fittest. Will we soon have to decide who鈥檚 most important? When I heard Donald Trump had been tested I thought, well, the President will never be denied resources.

We already esteem importance, in our perceptions of history. We were taught the Black Death took a quarter of the population: figures based on privileged urbanites. Now, scholarship factoring in the rural underclass estimates sixty per cent of Europe. Most lost without trace or record.

One of my clergyman grandfather鈥檚 first duties of 1918 was to bury eleven in one day鈥� victims, not of war but of 鈥檉lu. We know it killed more. But the trenches took the young men, and perhaps we missed them more.

Some years ago three generations were living in a vicarage that caught fire. The older ones were found and rescued: the children lost. My mother was distraught. What grandparents, she agonised, would want to be saved in place of the children? Older people are already saying they don鈥檛 want scant resources at the cost of the young.

An impressive denial of self looks very different when decided by society. Women and children were rescued first from the Titanic: an extraordinary sacrifice of the strongest, inspired by centuries of Christianity.

Now, they say, it would be young adults. Because they have more to give? Or simply are stronger to survive. Arguably the more we favour the weak, the more civilised we are.

No human life can ever be worth less than another鈥檚. Yesterday we heard centenarian Dame Fanny Waterman say she was asked to step down, aged ninety five, still with years to give. After I鈥檇 finished writing this script last night I read it to my father, as I always did for his approval; told him I loved him; and said goodbye. Five minutes after I reached my destination I got a call to say he鈥檇 died. A shock? Hardly, at a hundred and two. A loss? More than words can say. Last Thursday he was still helping me translate 脝nead Six.

Society sometimes must evaluate, when not everyone can be saved. But all such evaluation is false.

Death equalises all. Not because it comes for all. But because the Pale Horse of plague and pestilence is the enemy of us all. The Last Enemy, wrote St Paul. Rage, rage wrote Dylan Thomas.

Death is always an outrage. For fittest and weakest, richest and poorest, barely-born or a hundred-and-two.

Every one.

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