With drums pounding faster than Morse code transmissions and guitars snarling and chomping through claustrophobic speed-metal chords, Anthrax's songs hurl themselves headlong against life-and-death questions, urgently seeking a moral position.

To tame the Parlement, to fill the King's coffers: these are now life-and-death questions.

While banks were split, insurance agents cast Glass-Steagall as a life-and-death question.

There hasn't been a better time for a movie that asks Americans to think about life-and-death questions than after a weekend in which hundreds of thousands of protesters marched to make their feelings known about a possible war with Iraq.

At such a time, indeed, every fiber of their combined intellects must have been concentrated upon the vital question of the minute--the life-and-death question to them of retracing their steps to camp.

Julianne Moore, as a morose Los Angeles housewife in 1951, and Meryl Streep, as a book editor living in contemporary Greenwich Village, are Woolf's spiritual heirs nagged by profound life-and-death questions.

"That life-and-death question was fairly simple to answer," Dr. Jones said recently, standing in a thicket of greenhouse-raised experimental wheat plants that towered over him.

I hope you do, for now I must ask two life-and-death questions.

Whether a reader agrees with Lynch or is annoyed by his omissions and contradictions, each of these essays raises what are literally life-and-death questions.

The life-and-death questions.