I remember a kid in our neighbourhood. Randy. Tall and skinny, hair like a wire brush, always scrambling up trees, old walls, rock faces, anything, as long as it was a long way up, with some narrow place to balance on. I remember watching him skip along the rusty parapet that marked the edge of safety over the sewerage creek at the bottom of the block, his mother screaming at him to get down before he fell.

"But, Mom!" he answered, "I've done it a hundred times! Nothing ever happened before!"

I remember the day the cops came to get his parents in a black-and-white. The papers said he'd been horsing around with friends at Mount Doug lookout, and fell.

You can do it a hundred times without falling: you only have to fall once.

There's a skull in South Africa called the Taung Child. He was an austrolopithecus africanus, a boy, his adult molars just erupting, three million years ago, when a predator snatched him from his tribe. I can never read about him without seeing Randy, up on the parapet, smiling and waving, supremely sure of his balance and his life, telling his mother that "nothing ever happened before!"

It is a truism that the young are convinced of their immortality. To understand the brittleness of life, one must see it shattered more than once. In North America, it can take years to meet death often enough to understand its annihilating finality. Rich beyond imagining, we weave flimsy fantasies of clones with downloaded personalities, of medical breakthroughs, of genetic alterations that will allow us not only to live forever, but to remain eternally young, healthy and beautiful.

It isn't going to happen. It is not the nature of a universe in which even the stars are dying, in which everything, from the subatomic level to the universe itself will eventually cease to exist. Think of that, for a minute. Our star is at least four billion years old: someday, it will be gone. The galaxy in which it whirls among billions will one day run into its neighbour and be pulled apart. The universe, one way or another, will, someday, be empty of matter. Not even death can exist where there is nothing left to die.

We, of all people, should know this. More educated, more technologically gifted, than any previous people, we have catalogued the lives, evolution and extinction of individuals, cultures, species, planets, stars. Yet we seem unable to read the simple truth in what we know: all that lives is born to die. Yes, we say, of course: the dinosaurs, the trilobites, the Neandertals, some great black hole, far away, but not me, no, surely, not me, not us!

I've been here a hundred times: nothing ever happened before!

So we go on, getting and spending, especially spending, not, as my Grandmother used to say, as if there were no tomorrow, but as if there were infinite tomorrows, all just like today. We assume that, somewhere, there are scientists taking care of it all, and that, when we need them, they will have it ready, and for a price we can afford.

Not everyone shares this optimism. The farther one gets from the centres of economic and military might, the more one meets people who understand that life is a feeble flame against a hurricane. They do not dream of infinitely programmable self-replication: if they dream, it is of food for their families, of water clean enough to drink with minimal chance of desease, of working only ten hours in the day, or of getting to the market and back without being hit by a mortar round or a sniper's bullet.

They outnumber us, the poor, the hungry, the marginal, the threatened. We are the privileged few who live on their backs. We dream of life eternal, while they spend every waking moment trying to outrun death.

Why, then, do we not cherish life more?

Because that which is plenty is cheap. When I was a child, my parents used to bring home fish and chips. The fish was cod, because we were not wealthy, and cod was the least expensive fish in the shop. Not anymore. The G8 nations have fished the Grand Banks to the brink of extinction, possibly beyond. We did not conceive that the fish could run out. Now that they have, many countries have begun exploiting new resources, descending upon the African coast with great factory fleets, technological marvels with which the local fishermen cannot begin to compete, netting catches of which they could never dream.

If life is eternal, then what value has it? It is this conviction of personal immortality that makes it impossible to understand the terrible finiteness of life, to appreciate the fragile interconnectedness of all that lives on this world. How can one comprehend the irrecoverable loss in the death of an insect, a species of fish, a child, a valley, a country, if one cannot understand that it is a loss every one of us must someday share.

The dinosaurs, the Neandertals, the dire wolf, even the tiger, far away, but not me, no, surely, not us.

And, imagining that life eternal, the dreamers imagine, too, that it shall be then even as now, that everything they know is also immortal, from green, well-watered lawns to plastic bottle caps and enough gas to run the SUV down to the corner store every day. What need to listen to tree-huggers and eco-radicals, peaceniks and other Cassandras: it will all be taken care of. And, if, for some reason, some vital element runs out, well, the market will see to it that a cheap alternative is found.

We've done it a hundred times. Nothing ever happened before!

Today, as every day in recent weeks, I read the news from Washington. After two quick wars against vastly inferior armies in faraway nations full of the poor and hungry, the administration has turned its attention to the home economy, simultaneously cutting taxes to the rich and authorising new levels of indebtedness to continue governing. Vast new tracts of formerly protected land are being opened to oil exploitation, environmental regulations are being rolled back, Ford has begun selling an SUV that is less fuel efficient than the Model T. A trade war looms over European resistance to genetically-modified foods. Threats and accusations have gone out to Iran, Syria, even Canada. Pressure is increasing on South American and African nations to enter free trade agreements.

And I think of Randy, young and immortal, balanced on that rusty pipe, confident that the law of gravity did not apply to him. I remember the cops in their black-and-white.

You can do it a hundred times without falling: you can only fall once.

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