NEW YORK — In his novel, “A Single Man,” Christopher Isherwood writes of “that marvelous minority, The Living.” Yes, memento mori, we are a minority.

Isherwood continues: “They don’t know their luck, these people on the sidewalk, but George knows his — for a little while at least — because he is freshly returned from the icy presence of The Majority, which Doris is about to join.”

Doris lies dying in a hospital bed. On leaving her, Isherwood’s protagonist is seized with euphoria. “I am alive , he says to himself, I am alive! And life-energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite.”

It comes down to this in the end — the minority of the living, a mere 6.7 billion people on a fragile planet, and the majority of the dead, numberless and stretching back over an expanse vaster than the iciest steppe. Do you choose the minority or the majority? For whose account do you labor?