Headlines which constantly remind us of lethal crime heighten the sense of life’s fragility in all of us. Which of us has not heard gunshots in the distance and surmised a death or more? Over the years gunfire has been so close to a number of my friends that they have ducked to safety in their homes. Violence has not been a rumour far away.
But, after all, the brutal violence of bandits contributes only a small, though psychologically terrifying, part of life’s fragility. Cars driven dangerously or too fast or drunkenly cause more deaths than bandits do. And every day death comes calling in all of nature’s ordinary, ruthless ways. At school the epistles and odes of the great Roman poet, Quintus Horatius Flaccus,
