Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings April 2014, Volume 27, Number 2 | Page 102

MUSINGS ON MORTALITY
Victor Brombert, a 90-yearold emeritus professor of literature at Yale and Princeton,
who escaped Hitler and fought
as a young American soldier on
Omaha Beach, has written Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to
Primo Levi, which examines how
eight major 20th-century authors
wrote about death (15). Since physicians face the end of life rather
frequently with their patients and
themselves, the book may be of
interest. It includes the thoughts
regarding this topic of Leo Tolstoy
(The Death of Ivan Ilych); Thomas Mann (Death in Venice, The
Magic Mountain, Mario and the Magician); Franz Kafka (The
Death Journey in the Everlasting Present); Virginia Woolf (To the
Lighthouse, Between the Acts, Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, The
Waves, The Years, The Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own,
Orlando, Elegy); Albert Camus (The Stranger, The Plague, The
First Man, A Happy Death, Nuptials, The Myth of Sisyphus, The
Wind of Djémila, The Fall, The Exile and the Kingdom); Giorgio
Basani (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, Five Stories of Ferrara, The Heron, “The Cardplayers”); J. M.
Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians, Boyhood, Elizabeth Costello,
Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Slow Man, The Good Soldier, Foe, Youth, Age of Iron, Disgrace, The Master of Petersburg);
and Primo Levi (The Search for Roots, The Wrench, The Periodic
Table, The Sixth Day, The Drowned and the Saved, Lager, Survival
in Auschwitz, If Not Now, When?, The Truce, If This Is a Man).
In the epilogue, Brombert emphasizes that Musings on
Mortality is not to be mistaken for meditations on death or
obsessions with it. Confronting mortality implies being alive,
questioning how to live, or raising moral issues. He affirms
that the need to live fully is “prompted by the recurrent sense
of the transitory and the perishable.” Thus, he stresses that we
should savor whatever hours we are granted, for soon enough
the eternal barman will announce with finality the last call.
THE PASSENGER PIGEON
Joel Greenberg has written
A Feathered River Across the Sky
about the disappearance of the
passenger pigeon (16). Two hundred years ago, the passenger pigeon was one of North America’s
greatest natural wonders. One
hundred years later it was gone, as
lost as the dinosaurs. Greenberg’s
book tells the sad story of how
this singular species, once the
most numerous bird on the planet, became extinct. The passenger
pigeon, a relative of the common
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city pigeon, but larger and more brightly colored with a long
tail, once flew in America’s skies in flocks of astonishing size.
Around 1860, an English naturalist visiting the US wrote:
Early in the morning . . . I was perfectly amazed to behold
the air filled, the sun obscured by millions of pigeons . . . in a
vast mass a mile or more in breadth, and stretching before and
behind as far as the eye could reach. . . . It was late afternoon
before any decrease in the mass was perceptible. . . . The column
(allowing a probable velocity of sixty miles an hour) could not
have been less than 300 miles in length. That suggests there
were more than 3.7 billion birds in that flock—only a portion
of the entire continental population.

This report was not an outlier. Such distinguished ornithologists
as Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon reported similar
sightings, as did many others.
But, on September 1, 1914, Martha, a denizen of the Cincinnati Zoo, was found dead in her cage. She was the last of her
kind. Stuffed and mounted, she is in the Smithsonian, although
not currently on display. What could have driven a bird so
abundant as to blot out the sun into extinction in only half a
century? Joel Greenberg makes clear it was the combination of
three factors: the species’ peculiar nesting habits, the Industrial
Revolution, and human ignorance.
The passenger pigeon was a child of the once vast eastern
North American forest, a forest that stretched unbroken from
the Atlantic to well past the Mississippi River. The nut trees of
this forest, such as oak and beech, produced mast in prodigious
quantities, which animals like the passenger pigeon would feed
on, but mast is produced irregularly. One year in one area there
is a bumper crop; the next year that area will likely produce
next to none. So passenger pigeons not only migrated in mass
numbers, they also nestled that way, flocking to an area where
lots of mast had been produced the previous fall. These nesting
areas could themselves be almost unimaginably huge. One in
Wisconsin in 1872 covered 850 square miles of forest. A single
tree might contain a hundred nesting pairs or more. Some observers reported trees with as many as 600 nests.
In the morning, the males would leave the nesting area to
forage, returning at midday, when the females would leave.
About 2 weeks after the eggs hatched, the adults abandoned the
well-fed, indeed roly-poly squabs, who would flutter down to
the ground and begin feeding for themselves. After a few days
they would be strong enough to fly away.
Mass nesting in unpredictable locations was an effective reproductive strategy for the passenger pigeon as a species. Predators
who happened to be nearby would have a field day, but with so
many pigeons and squabs, they could hardly make a dent in the
total numbers. Even in the early days of European settlement,
when settlers armed with shotguns discovered they could bring
down a dozen or more pigeons with a single blast, human hunters
weren’t numerous enough to be a threat to the birds.
But in the 19th century, the burgeoning population of the
US surged westward, and the forest was increasingly turned to
farmland. The big eastern cities, growi