We’re all living it

“We’re all living it” is the compact, unsettling claim George Stark borrows from William S. Burroughs: that life after death is not a separate future but the condition people already inhabit. Stark uses the remark to argue that the distinction does not matter. The surrounding story makes that dismissal grimly unstable, as sparrows identified as guides between the dead and the living become a material force in the struggle over who belongs to which world.

The remark and its source

At the Beaumont lake house, Thad recalls being on a 1981 panel with Burroughs at the New School in New York. During the question-and-answer session, a young audience member asked whether Burroughs believed in life after death. Burroughs answered that he did, adding that he thought everyone was already living it. Stark approves of the thought and folds it into his own argument: if the living are already inhabiting the afterlife, then the boundary between life and death seems to him to matter little.

The phrase arrives through Thad’s recollection, but Stark turns the anecdote into a present-tense weapon of interpretation. Thad has just made a joke about twins thinking alike; Stark laughs, and the twins laugh with him. The easy, almost convivial exchange is set against Alan Pangborn’s wary attention. Alan reads Thad’s face as evidence that the distinction does matter to him, and he knows there are sparrows Stark does not know about. The line’s apparent bravado therefore exposes a conflict rather than settling one.

A folkloric boundary between worlds

Earlier, Thad asks Rawlie DeLesseps whether he still teaches his Folk Myth seminar, explaining that he has a story idea in its exploratory stage. When they meet again, Rawlie tells him that he may have found what Thad was seeking about the sparrows, then consults Barringer’s Folklore of America. He describes psychopomps as guides who conduct human souls between the land of the living and the land of the dead. Loons and whippoorwills, according to the book, gather near impending deaths and guide newly dead souls onward; sparrows have a more ominous role as outriders of the deceased, guiding lost souls back into the living world. Rawlie names them harbingers of the living dead.

That folklore gives the phrase a precise counterweight. Burroughs’s saying blurs the division between life and death as an idea; Rawlie’s account makes the crossing an active process with agents and consequences. The birds are not simply emblems interpreted after the fact. Thad’s inquiry begins as a possible story, but the folkloric explanation gives him a framework for recognizing what the sparrows are doing as the danger grows.

When the saying meets the birds

At Gold’s Junkyard and Auto Supply, Thad and Rawlie find the piled-up cars and trucks carpeted with sparrows. The flock has arrived without Thad hearing it; the birds occupy hoods, roofs, windows, grilles, engine blocks, and frames, watching in silence. Rawlie, seeing the gathering, asks what the psychopomps mean. The uncanny assembly makes his earlier account immediate: the learned explanation is now confronted by a presence too large and concrete to dismiss as mere folklore.

Later, near the Williamses’ driveway by Castle Lake, sparrows land on Alan. One hops from his shoulder to his hand and dips its beak toward his palm before stopping; Alan brushes it away, then watches it rejoin the others. The birds fill the visible trees, and a branch cracks under their weight. Yet when Alan retreats up the driveway to Lake Lane, they remain clustered around the A-frame and his car rather than following him. He reads the ground they occupy as a possible staging area. Their distribution and their unnerving stillness make the flock seem less like background wildlife than a presence with its own limits and timing.

On Thad’s approach to the house, the birds form a sharp boundary across the road. One flutters onto the hood of his stalled VW and peers in with what he senses as dispassionate curiosity. He understands that reaching the house means driving over the flock: they are not merely in the road; they have become the road. The choice turns an abstract claim about living and dying into a physical threshold Thad must cross, with the safety of the people inside at stake.

Escort back to the dead

At the climax, Thad recognizes the arriving psychopomps as Stark’s escort back to the land of the dead. As the door opens and the air fills with sparrows, he drops his pencil and retreats toward his children. Birds settle on Stark’s shoulders, arms, and head, then strike his chest in growing numbers. Stark twists beneath the flock, trying to fight back against the force gathering around him. The folkloric account Rawlie had supplied becomes the action’s literal terms: the birds conduct the dead, and Stark is taken from the living world.

The phrase thus carries an irony that Stark’s own interpretation misses. He treats the supposed nearness of the afterlife as proof that the distinction is inconsequential; the ending makes the crossing consequential, selective, and violent. “We’re all living it” remains a memorable formulation of blurred borders, but the sparrows insist that a boundary can be crossed without being erased—and that no human declaration controls who escorts whom across it.