We hear from three narrators who are gone in “Deuteronomy 2:10,” but we are reminded there are more.

Track: “Deuteronomy 2:10”
Album: The Life of the World to Come (2009) and The Life of the World in Flux (2009)

When confronting all of the songs on The Life of the World to Come, I try to remember how they sounded in 2009. “Deuteronomy 2:10” is a crushing, impossible song now. I suppose it was then, too, but I don’t remember it hitting me as hard at the time. There are other songs on the album that are more directly about human loss, pain, and memory, and I think it’s only natural that those feel more immediate and more memorable to us.

“Deuteronomy 2:10” is the story of three animals who are now extinct. It’s sung from their perspective, as we hear the last tiger of its kind accept that it will die in captivity, a flightless bird smell the burning of timber that signals the end of a forest, and a toad ribbit by itself in moonlight. Extinction as a concept is huge to confront, almost impossibly big to imagine. There are so many songs about death and loss that it is surprising, somewhat, to find a deeper kind of end that asks even more of you, emotionally.

The verse in Deuteronomy is a simple one, a brief reference to a people, the Emites, who no longer live in a place. It is about a kind of extinction, but the final part of the verse says the Emites were “as tall as the Anakites.” The Anakites were supposedly giants and were the ancestors to Goliath, who David slew. What’s interesting is that even a verse about an extinct people briefly references yet another group that’s gone, reminding us of the multitudes more beyond these three narrators.