Chapter 20 Violent corpse wild

Most of the dead animals you see on the roads around the city are dogs, and a few cats.Deep into the countryside, the shapes and colors of animal carcasses are unfamiliar.Those are wild animals.Viewed from a car window, their mutilated limbs remind us of woodchucks, badgers, weasels, voles, snakes, and sometimes deer mutilated beyond recognition. This scene always gives people inexplicable shock.Half of it was sudden pity, and the other half was surprise for no reason.Seeing dead animals on the roads is nothing short of shocking.This kind of spiritual damage is not all because they died in the wrong place.No matter where they died, they shouldn't be displayed in front of us so shockingly.You don't want to see dead animals lying in broad daylight.Animals should die alone, far away, and unnoticed.That's what they are.They should not be seen lying on the road, they should not be seen dead anywhere.

Everything is mortal, but we only think of death as an abstract concept.Standing on the grass, at the foot of a mountain, and looking around carefully, almost everything you see is dying, and most things will die before you.If it weren't for the process of renewal and replacement going on before your eyes, the place would eventually turn to stone and gravel beneath your feet. Some creatures seem to never die.They just disappear entirely among their offspring.This is true for individual cells.One cell becomes two, two becomes four, and so on, and after a while the last trace of itself disappears.This cannot be regarded as death; aside from mutations, those descendants are only the first cells to live anew.There are end stages in the life cycle of slime molds that appear to be dead, but the dry slugs, with their stalks and fruiting bodies, are clearly transitional tissues of the developing animal.Swimming amebocytes collectively use this mechanism to generate more cells.

It is said that there are billions of trillions of insects living on the earth at any one time.Most of them are short-lived by our standards.It has been estimated that over every square mile of the temperate zone, and extending thousands of feet into the atmosphere, there are twenty-five million insects of every description suspended.They floated like plankton in the layers of the atmosphere, dying constantly, some were eaten, and some just fell down anytime and anywhere.They surround the earth like this, countless, and when they die, they decompose without anyone seeing them. Has anyone seen a dead bird?Of course so many birds are dying, but who has seen so many dead birds?Dead birds are not to be seen.It is more surprising to see a dead bird than a live one suddenly soaring into flight.There must be something wrong in our minds.Birds always die on the back of people, under the rocks in the bushes, and never fly and fall down.

Animals seem to have this instinct: to die alone, and to execute people behind their backs.Even the biggest, most conspicuous animals try to hide themselves when the time comes.If an elephant dies in the open by mistake, the herd won't let it stay there.They would lift it up and carry it around until they found an inexplicably suitable place to put it down.When elephants encounter the remains of their own kind left in the open, they will methodically pick them up piece by piece, and evacuate them into the adjacent wilderness in mournful memorial ceremonies. This is a wonder of nature.Everything in the world is mortal, dying every moment, as many as the new births that dazzle us every morning, every spring.But what we see are nothing more than unrecognizable stumps, flies struggling in the foyer of villas in October and remains on the road.All my life I've been haunted by a gourd: my backyard is full of squirrels, all year round, but I've never seen a dead squirrel anywhere.

I guess there's nothing wrong with that.If the world hadn't been like this, where dead things were done openly, and dead bodies were everywhere, we'd never forget it.Fortunately, we can forget about it most of the time, or think it was an accident that could have been avoided in some way.But it does also make us see the process of dying as more unexpected than it really is, and more embarrassing when we have to be in it. We are also, in our own way, trying to harmonize ourselves with nature as much as possible.The obituary column in the newspaper tells us that we are dying, and the birth column, in small print, inconspicuously printed in the margin, tells us of our successors.But from here we still can't grasp the scale.There are three billion of us on the earth, and in our lifetime, these three billion will die at the right time.The huge death toll of more than 50 million per year is happening relatively quietly.We only know when a family member or friend dies.These deaths, taken in isolation, are considered unnatural events, abnormalities, and injuries.We whisper of these deaths, of being struck down by disease, or of dying.It is as if visible death can only happen for some reason and is avoidable.We send wreaths, grieve, hold funerals; remove ashes, forgetting that three billion are all on the way.All the flesh and consciousness of this multitude will eventually be lost, absorbed by the earth, and the temporary survivors will be unaware of it.

In less than fifty years, the number of descendants who will replace us will be more than twice this number.It's hard to imagine how we can continue to keep this secret with so many people dying.We will have to give up the notion that death is a disaster, or abominable, or avoidable, or even strange.We will need to know a little more about the cycle of the entire system of life outside of us, about our connection to this overall process.The life of any thing is exchanged for the death of a certain thing, one cell for another.Perhaps it is a comfort to be aware of this synchronous process.This process is expressed as follows: We are all going downhill together, and our partners are all over the world.