The exhausted gannet

We were walking along the cliff edge on the North Hill and I peered over the rocks and saw on a shelf of rock below a large, beautiful, white bird with yellow markings that I realised was a gannet. Below it the sea was surging into the geo and washing back to meet a new incoming wave, so that there was foam and turbulence, a huge power of water. There was something awkward about the posture of the bird and we realised it had a damaged or broken wing. Soon it was swept off the shelf in the cliff and was tossed like a white discoloured rag backwards and forwards, seeming to make progress and then washed further back from where it had started, but plunging forward again, and then washed back, with no escape as its strength failed, and yet it showed no signs of distress, simply, as it were, undertaking its task. It was pushed against the rock and this time scrambled up awkwardly and astonishinglyonto another shelf, and it sat there, looking ahead, resting. We walked on, discussing its likely fate, death by drowning when the water reached the new shelf, or to be killed by seals as it entered the waves, unable to fly. Half an hour later it was still resting on its ledge of sandstone rock, but the surge of water was higher ...

Nor hope nor dread attend/A dying animal ... and, as Johnson said, it is not the thought but the prospect of death that concentrates the mind wonderfully and I have more than once seen in the eyes of a dying man the look of one who withdraws from the world, but looks back upon it as a whole ... as though weighing it in the balance as he makes his farewells, having less and less to do with those he leaves behind ...