Julian Barnes, Nothing To Be Frightened Of
Julian Barnes, Nothing To Be Frightened Of, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2008
My brother remembers a ritual—never witnessed by me—which he called the Reading of the Diaries. Grandma and Grandpa each kept separate diaries, and of an evening would sometimes entertain themselves by reading out loud to one another what they had recorded on that very week several years previously. The entries were apparently of considerable banality but frequent disagreement. Grandpa: “ ‘Friday. Worked in garden. Planted potatoes.’” Grandma: “Nonsense. ‘Rained all day. Too wet to work in garden.’” 6
…I asked, “But you approve of R.?” / “It’s irrelevant,” my brother replied, “whether or not I approve of R.” / “No, it’s not. C. might want you to approve of him.” / “On the contrary, she might want me not to approve of him.” / “But either way, it’s not irrelevant to her whether or not you approve or disapprove.” / He thought this over for a moment. “You’re right,” he said. / You can perhaps tell from the these exchanges that he is the elder brother. 8-9
…my mother telephoned and picked up on the fact that I had described myself as an agnostic. She told me that this was how Dad used to describe himself—whereas she was an atheist. She made it sound as if being an agnostic was a wishy-washy liberal position, as opposed to the truth-and-marked-forces reality of atheism. “What’s all this about death anyway?” she continued. I explained that I didn’t like the idea of it. “You’re just like your father,” she replied. “Maybe it’s your age. When you get to my age you won’t mind so much. I’ve seen the best of life anyway. 9
He died a modern death, in hospital, without his family, attended in his final minutes by a nurse, months—indeed, years—after medical science had prolonged his life to a point where the terms on which it was being offered were unimpressive. 10
Wanting to see her dead came more, I admit, from writerly curiosity than filial feeling… 13
My father had died at the same age. I had always imagined that his would be the harder death, because I had loved him the more, whereas at best I could only be irritatedly fond of my mother. But it worked the other way round… 13
The son of a tobacconist, Alex was reading Wittgenstein at sixteen, and writing poetry which pulsed with ambiguities—double, triple, quadruple, like heart bypasses. He was better than me at English, and took a scholarship to Cambridge, after which I lost sight of him. Down the years I would occasionally imagine his presumed success in one of the liberal professions. I was over fifty when I learnt that such biography-giving was an idle fantasy. Alex had killed himself—with pills, over a woman—in his late twenties, half my life ago. / So I had no faith to lose, only a resistance, which felt more heroic than it was, to the mild regime of God-fearing that an English education entailed: scripture lessons, morning prayers and hymns, the annual Thanksgiving service in St. Paul’s Cathedral. And what was it, apart from the role of Second Shepherd in a nativity play at my primary school. I was never baptized, never sent to Sunday school. I have never been to a normal church service in my life. I do baptisms, weddings, funerals. I am constantly going into churches, but for architectural reasons; and, more widely, to get a sense of what Englishness once was. 15
… “Go on, believe! It does no harm.” This weak-tea version, the weary murmur of a man with a metaphysical headache, comes from Wittgenstein’s notebooks. If you were the Deity, you might be a little unimpressed by such lukewarm endorsement. But there are times, probably, when “it does no harm”—except for not being true, which some might find irreducible, unnegotiable harm. / As an example: some twenty years before he wrote this note, Wittgenstein worked as a schoolmaster in several remote villages of lower Austria. The locals found him austere and eccentric, yet devoted to his pupils; also willing, despite his own religious doubts, to begin and end each day with the paternoster. While teaching at Trattenbach, Wittgenstein took his pupils on a study trip to Vienna. The nearest station was at Gloggnitz, twelve miles away, so the trip began with a pedagogic hike through the intervening forest, with the children being asked to identify plants and stones they had studied in class. In Vienna, they spent two days doing the same with examples of architecture and technology. Then they took the train back to Gloggnitz. By the time it arrived, night was falling. They set off on their return twelve-mile hike. Wittgenstein, sensing that many of the children were frightened, went from one to the other, saying quietly, “Are you afraid? Well, then, you must think only about God.” They were, quite literally, in a dark wood. Go on, believe! It does no harm. And presumably it didn’t. A nonexistent God will at least protect you from nonexistent elves and sprites and wood demons, even if not from existent wolves and bears (and lionesses.) / A Wittgenstein scholar suggests that while the philosopher was not “a religious person,” there was in him “in some sense, the possibility of religion”; though his idea of it was less to do with belief in a creator than with a sense of sin and a desire for judgment. He thought that “Life can educate one to a belief in God”—this is one of his last notes. He also imagined himself being asked the question of whether or not he would survive death, and replying that he couldn’t say: not for the reasons you or I might give, but because “I haven’t a clear idea of what I am saying when I’m saying ‘I don’t cease to exist.’” I shouldn’t think many of us do, except for fundamentalist self-immolators expecting very specific rewards. Though what it means, rather than what it might imply, is surely within our grasp. 22-23
My friend R. recently asked me how often I think about death, and in what circumstances. At least once each waking day, I replied; and then there are the intermittent nocturnal attacks. Mortality often gatecrashes my consciousness when the outside world presents an obvious parallel: as evening falls, as the days shorten, or towards the end of a long day’s hiking. 24
In the 1920s, Sibelius would go to the Kamp restaurant in Helsinki and join the so-called “lemon table”: the lemon being the Chinese symbol of death. He and his fellow-diners—painters, industrialists, doctors, and lawyers—were not just permitted, but required to talk about death. 25
… “Fear of death may be the most intense emotion of all. I sometimes think that there is no deeper feeling.” These views were not publicly expressed. Shostakovich knew that death—unless it came in the form of heroic martyrdom—was not an appropriate subject for Soviet art, that it was “tantamount to wiping your nose on your sleeve in company.” He could not have the Dies Irae blaze from his scores; he had to be musically covert. 27
This is not, by the way, “my autobiography.” Nor am I “in search of my parents.” I know that being someone’s child involves both a sense of nauseated familiarity and large no-go areas of ignorance—at least, if my family is anything to judge by. And though I still wouldn’t mind a transcript of that pouffe’s contents, I don’t think my parents had any rare secrets. Part of what I’m doing—which may seem unnecessary—is trying to work out how dead they are. My father died in 1992, my mother in 1997. 35-36
…Jules Renard, who said: “It is when faced with death that we turn most bookish.” 39
Nowadays, our ambitions have grown more puny. “Courage,” Larkin wrote “Aubade,” his great death-poem, “means not scaring others.” Not back then it didn’t. It meant a great deal more: showing others how to die honourably, wisely, and with constancy. / One of Montaigne’s key instances is the story of Pomponius Atticus, a correspondent of Cicero’s. When Atticus fell ill, and medical attempts to prolong his existence merely prolonged his pain, he decided that the best solution was to starve himself to death. 41
Miraculously, abstinence turned out to be the best cure for his (unnamed) condition; and soon, the sick man was undeniably on the mend. There was much rejoicing and feasting; perhaps the doctors even withdrew their bills. But Atticus interrupted the merriment. Since we all must die one day, he announced, and since I have already made such fine strides in that direction, I have no desire to turn around now, only to start again another time. And so, to the admiring dismay of those around him, Atticus continued to refuse food and went to his exemplary death. 42
He hopes that death, his companion, his familiar, will make its final house-call when he is in the middle of doing something ordinary—like planting his cabbages. 42
…what exactly are you asking for when you complain against death? Do you want an immortality spent on this earth, given the terms and conditions currently applicable? (I see the argument, but how about a bit of immortality? Half? OK, I’ll settle for a quarter.) 43
I asked him to elaborate on his dismissal of the line “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him” as “soppy.” He admits that he isn’t really sure how to take my statement: “I suppose as a way of saying ‘I don’t believe there are any gods, but I wish there were (or perhaps: but I wish I did).’ 44-45
A common response in surveys of religious attitudes is to say something like, “I don’t got to church, but I have my own personal idea of God.” This kind of statement makes me in turn react like a philosopher. Soppy, I cry. You may have your own personal idea of God, but does God have His own personal idea of you? Because that’s what matters. Whether He’s an old man with a white beard sitting in the sky, or a life force, or a disinterested prime mover, or a clockmaker, or a woman, or a nebulous moral force, or Nothing At All, what counts is what He, She, It or Nothing thinks of you rather than you of them. The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque. It also doesn’t matter whether God is just or benevolent or even observant—of which there seems startlingly little proof—only that He exists. 46
Renard never indulges his child alter ego with retrospective self-pity, that emotion (normally arising in adolescence, though it may last for ever) which renders many reworkings of childhood fake. For Renard, a child was “a small, necessary animal, less human than cat.” This remark comes from his masterpiece, the Journal he kept form 1887 until his death in 1910. 48
Francois Renard, however, knows or believes himself to be incurably ill. Four weeks later, he locks the bedroom door, takes his shotgun, and uses a walking stick to press the trigger. He succeeds in firing both barrels, just to make sure. Jules is summoned; he breaks down the door; there is smoke and the smell of powder. At first he thinks his father must be joking; then he is obliged to believe in the sprawled figure, the unseeing eyes, and the “dark place above the waist, like a small extinguished fire.” He takes his father’s hands; they are still warm, still pliant (50)…Jules judges that his father has died heroically, showing Roman virtues. He notes: “On the whole, this death has added to my sense of pride.” Six weeks after the funeral, he concludes: “The death of my father makes me feel as if I had written a beautiful book.” 51
Missing God is focused for me by missing the underlying sense of purpose and belief when confronted with religious art. Is is one of the haunting hypotheticals for the nonbeliever: what would it be like “if it were true”…Imagine hearing the Mozart Requiem in a great cathedral… 54
Pretending to beliefs we don’t have during Mozart’s Requiem is like pretending to find Shakespeare’s horn jokes funny (though some theatre goers still relentlessly laugh). 55
Montaigne’s nearest British equivalent, Sir Thomas Browne, wrote: “For a pagan there might be some motives to be in love with life, but, for a Christian to be amazed at [i.e. terrified of] death, I cannot see how he can escape this dilemma—that he is too sensible of this life, or hopeless of the life to come.” 61
I can’t claim that confronting death (no, that sounds too active, too pretend-heroic—the passive mode is better: I can’t claim that being confronted by death) has given me any greater accommodation with it, let alone made me wiser, or more serious, or more…anything, really. I could try arguing that we cannot truly savour life without a regular awareness of extinction: it’s the squeeze of the lemon, the pinch of salt that intensifies the flavour. But do I really think that my death-denying (or religious) friends appreciate that bunch of flowers/work of art/glass of wine less than I do? No. 65-66
But I repeat and insist that I suffer from rational (yet RATIONAL) fear. The earliest known Dance of Death, painted on a wall of the Cimetiere des Innocents in Paris in 1425, had a text which began “O creature roysonnable/ Qui desires vie eternelle” [O rational creature/ Who wishes for eternal life]. 66
In 1987 an American neuroscientist claimed to have located exactly where in the brain a certain electrical instability triggers religious feelings…In one experiment, fifteen Carmelite nuns were asked to remember their most profound mystical experiences: scans showed electrical activity and blood oxygen levels surging in at least twelve separate regions of their brains. 68
The differences my mother observed in her two sons pleased me more. “When they were boys, if I was ill, Julian climbed into bed and snuggled up to me, while his brother brought me a cup of tea.” Another distinction she reported: my brother once cacked his pants and responded with the words, “It will never happen again”—and it didn’t; whereas, when I failed to control my infant bowels, I was discovered merrily smearing my shit into the cracks between the floorboards. My favourite differentiation, however, was made much later in our mother’s life. By this time both her sons were established in their separate fields. This is how she expressed her pride in them: “One of my sons writes books I can read but can’t understand, and the other writes books I can understand but can’t read.” 69
Fear of death replaces fear of God. But fear of God—an entirely sane early principle, given the hazard of life and our vulnerability to thunderbolts of unknown origin—at least allowed for negotiation. We talked God down from being the Vengeful One and rebranded Him the Infinitely Merciful; we changed Him form Old to New, like the Testaments and the Labour Party. We levered up His graven image, put it on runners, and dragged it to a place where the weather was sunnier. We can’t do the same with death. Death can’t be talked down, or parlayed into anything; it simply declines to come to the negotiating table. 70
Stendhal… “Waiting for God to reveal himself, I believe that his prime minister, Chance, governs this sad world just as well.” (73)…And now he comes to Florence for the first time. He is arriving from Bologna; the coach crosses the Apennines and begins its descent towards the city. “My heart was leaping wildly within me. What utterly childlike excitement!” As the road bends, the cathedral, with Brunelleschi’s famous dome, comes into sight. At (73) the city gate, he abandons the coach—and his luggage—to enter Florence on foot, like a pilgrim. He finds himself at the church of Santa Croce. Here are the tombs of Michelangelo and Galileo; nearby is Canova’s bust of Alfieri. He thinks of the other great Tuscans: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch. “The tide of emotion that overwhelmed me flowed so deep that it was scarce to be distinguished from religious awe.” He asks a friar to unlock the Niccolini Chapel and let him look at the frescoes. He seats himself “on the step of a faldstool, with my head thrown back to rest upon the desk, so that I might let my gaze dwell on the ceiling.” The city and the proximity of its famous children have already put Beyle in a state of near trance. Now he is “absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty”; he attains “the supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion.” The italics are his. / The physical consequence of all this is a fainting fit. “As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart…The wellspring of life dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.” Beyle (who was Stendhal by the time he published this account in Rome, Naples and Florence) could describe his symptoms but not name his condition. Posterity, however, can, since posterity always knows best. Beyle was suffering, we can now tell him, from Stendhal’s Syndrome, a condition identified in 1979 by a Florentine psychiatrist who had noted almost a hundred cases of dizziness and nausea brought on by exposure to the city’s art treasures (74-75)…city confusion, timetable stress, masterpiece anxiety, information overload, and too much hot sun mixed with chilly air-conditioning. The very skeptical might wonder whether Stendhal himself was really suffering from Stendhal’s Syndrome…if you sit with your head back, staring for a long time at a painted wall, and then get to your feet and walk from the cool darkness of a church into the bright, dusty, frenetic swirl of a city, might you not expect to feel a little faint?...who would not understand and envy a man swooning at the Giottos in Santa Croce, the more so as he was seeing them with a mind and eye untrammeled by previous reproduction? The story is true, not least because we want it, we need it to be true. 75
Professor C. of Oxford… “The religion of art makes people worse, because it encourages contempt for those considered inartistic.” There may be something in this, though the larger problem, in Britain at least, is that of contempt from the opposite direction: from the complacent philistine towards those who practice and value the arts. 76
In my second term at Oxford, I had decided to give up modern languages for the more “serious” study of philosophy and psychology…How, I asked him, could I possibly be expected to have any understanding of, or sensible opinions about, a play like Phedre when I had only the remotest experience of the volcanic emotions depicted in it? He gave me a wry, donnish smile: “Well, which of us can ever say that we have?” / At this time, I kept a box of green index cards, onto which I copied epigrams, witticisms, scraps of dialogue, and pieces of wisdom worth preserving. Some of them strike me now as the meretricious generalizations that youth endorses… 83
Maugham… “Beauty is a bore.” 84
During the era of piety, princes and rich burghers used to summon priest and prelate to reassure them of the certainty of heaven and the rewards their prayers and monetary offerings had ensured. The agnostic Maugham now did the opposite: he summoned A. J. Ayer, the most intellectually and socially fashionable philosopher of the day, to reassure him that death was indeed final, and that nothing, and nothingness, followed it. The need for such reassurance might be explained by a passage in The Summing Up. There Maugham relates how, as a young man, he lost his belief in God, but nonetheless retained for a while an instinctive fear of hell, which it took him another metaphysical shrug to dislodge. Perhaps he was still looking over his shoulder. 84-85
Jules Renard imagined just such a parade-ground God, who would keep reminding those who finally made it to heaven: “You aren’t here to have fun, you know.” 88
On another day the wireless would disgorge The Critics, a band of suave aesthetic experts droning on about plays we would never see and books that never came into the house. My brother and I would listen with a kind of stunned boredom, which was not just of the present, but anticipatory: if such opinion-giving and –receiving was what adulthood contained, then it seemed not merely unattainable, but actively undesirable. 90
…will Richard Dawkins die better than our genetic ancestors hundreds or thousands of years ago? Dawkins has expressed the hope that “When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.” Clear enough, if illegal; yet death has an obstinate way of denying us the solutions we imagine for ourselves. 94
His father was a hospital surgeon; the family lived above the shop; Achille Flaubert would often come straight from his operating table to his dining table. The boy Gustave would climb a trellis and peer in at his father instructing medical students how to dissect corpses. He saw bodies covered in flies, and students casually resting their lit cigars on the limbs and trunks they were hacking away at. Achille would glance up, spot his son’s face at the window, and wave him away with his scalpel. 95
In April 1848, when Flaubert was twenty-six, the literary friend of his youth, Alfred Le Poittevin, died…He kept a vigil over his dead friend for two consecutive nights…When the undertakers arrived with the coffin, he kissed his friend on the temple (95) …Twenty-one years after Le Poittevin’s death, Louis Bouilhet, the literary friend of Flaubert’s maturity, died…You might think—if pit-gazing worked—that the previous experiences would make this one more bearable. But Flaubert found that he could not bear to see, watch over, embrace, wrap, or kiss the friend who had been so close that he once called him “my left testicle.”… “I did not dare see him! I feel weaker than I did twenty years ago…I lack any internal toughness. I feel worn out.” 96
Ah, the therapeuto-autobiographical fallacy. However well meant, it irritates me…Nor does writing about death either diminish or increase my fear of it. 97
I expect my departure to have been preceded by severe pain, fear, and exasperation at the imprecise or euphemistic use of language around me. 99
[Before mid-20s] As a young man, I was terrified of flying. The book I would choose to read on a plane would be something I felt appropriate to have found on my corpse. I remember taking Bouvard et Pecuchet on a flight from Paris to London…and I was naturally too scared during the flight to concentrate on a novel whose ironic truths in any case tend to be withheld from younger readers. 105
…Flaubertian self-reminder: “Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” 108
…Voltaire had similarly clung to his own pulse until the moment he slowly shook his head and, a few minutes later, died. An admirable death—with not a priest in sight—worthy of Montaigne’s catalogue. Not that it impressed everyone. Mozart, then in Paris, wrote to his father, “You probably already know that that godless arch-rogue Voltaire has died like a dog, like a beast—that’s his reward!” Like a dog, indeed. 110
Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death. 111
That medieval bird flies from darkness into a lighted hall and back out again. One of the oh-so-sensible arguments against death-anxiety goes like this: if we don’t fear and hate the eternity of time leading up to our brief moment of illuminated life, why therefore should we feel differently about the second spell of darkness, the universe—or at least, a very, very insignificant part of it—was leading up to the creation of something of decided interest…So that darkness had some purpose—at least, from my solipsistic point of view… 114
…my sense of morality is influenced by Christian teaching (or, more exactly, pre-Christian tribal behaviour codified by the religion)… 116
My mother considered quite seriously whether she would rather go deaf or go blind. Preferring one incapacity in advance seemed a superstitious method of ruling out the other. 121
The arrival into New York—the transit from airport to city—involves passing one of the vastest cemeteries I have ever seen. I always half-enjoy this ritual memento mori, probably because I have never come to love New York. All the bustle in that most ever-bustling and narcissistic of cities will come to this; Manhattan mocked by the packed verticality of the headstones. 127
Wharton’s success as a novelist is the more surprising—and the more admirable—given how little her view of life accorded with American hopefulness. She saw small evidence of redemption. She thought life a tragedy—or at best a grim comedy—with a tragic ending. Or, sometimes, just a drama with a dramatic ending. (Her friend Henry James defined life as “a predicament before death.” And his friend Turgenev believed that “the most interesting part of life is death.”) 129
A biographer friend once suggested she take the slightly longer view and write my life. Her husband argued satirically that this would make a very short work as all my days were the same. “Got up,” his version went. “Wrote book. Went out, brought bottle of wine. Came home, cooked dinner. Drank wine.” 129
Eugene O’Kelly was a fifty-three-year-old chairman and CEO of a top American accountancy firm (139)… three months and barely a day longer. / O’Kelly responds to this news like the “goal-driven person” and ultimate corporate competitor that he is. “Just as a successful executive is driven to be as strategic and prepared as possible to ‘win’ at everything, so I was now driven to be as methodical as possible during my last hundred days.” He plans to apply “the skill set of a CEO” to his predicament. He realizes that he must “come up with new goals. Fast.” He tries to “figure out how I as an individual needed to reposition swiftly to adjust to the new circumstances of my life.” He draws up “the final and most important to-do list of my life.” / Priorities, methods, targets. He gets his business and financial affairs in order. He decides how he is going to “unwind” his rela-(140)tionships by creating “perfect moments” and “perfect days.” He begins “transition to the next state.” He plans his own funeral. Ever competitive, he wants to make his death “the best death possible,” and after completing his to-do list, concludes: “Now, I was motivated to ‘succeed’ at death.” 141
Montaigne didn’t die, as he had dreamed, while planting out his cabbage patch. Death came for the sceptic and epicurean, the tolerant deist, the writer of boundless curiosity and learning, while mass was being celebrated in his bedroom: at the exact moment (or so they said) of the elevation of the host. 144
I, or even I, do not produce thoughts; thoughts produce me. 148
At Oxford, after giving up modern languages, my old-fashioned I studied philosophy for a couple of terms, at the end of which it was told it lacked the appropriate brain for the job. 148
Berkley’s. He held that the world of “houses, mountains, rivers and in a word all sensible objects” consists entirely of ideas, sensory experiences. What we like to think of as the real world, out there, corporeal, touchable, linear in time, is just private images—early cinema—unreeling in our heads…Dr. Johnson kicking a stone and crying, “I refute it thus!” 149
Oh yes, and he often wears a kind of eighteenth-century costume designed for him by his younger daughter: knee breeches, stockings, buckle shoes on the lower half; brocade waistcoat, stock, long hair tied in a bow on the upper. Perhaps I should have mentioned this before. 153
The better you know someone, the less well you often see them…They may be so close as to be out of focus…Often, when we talk about someone very familiar, we are referring back to the time when we first properly saw them, when they were held in the most useful—and flattering—light at the correct focal distance. 155
When I search my memory for specific instructions or advice laid down by my mother—for she would have been the lawgiver—I can only recall dicta not specifically aimed at me. For instance: only a spiv wears brown shoes with a blue suit; never move the hands of a clock or watch backwards; don’t put cheese biscuits in the same tin as sweet ones. Hardly urgent copy for the commonplace book. 156
In all my remembered life, he never told me that he loved me; nor did I reply in kind. 161
Hegel, on his deathbed, said, “Only one man ever understood me,” then added, “and he didn’t understand me.” Emily Dickenson said, “I must go on in. The fog is rising.”…Sometimes a last word might be a last gesture: Mozart’s was to mouth the sound of the timpani in his Requiem, whose unfinished score lay open on his bedspread. 166
Zola died in literary character, in a scene of psycho-melodrama worthy of his early friction. He and Alexandrine had returned to Paris from the house with the threatening window. It was a chilly day in late September, so they ordered a fire to be lit in their bedroom. While they were away, work had been done on the roof of the apartment building, and here the narrative offers the reader a choice of interpretations. The chimney leading from their bedroom had been blocked, either by incompetent artisans or—so the conspiracy runs—by murderous anti-Dreyfusards. The Zolas retired to be, locking the door as was their superstitious habit’ the smokeless fuel in the grate gave off carbon monoxide. In the morning, when servants broke down the door, they found the writer dead on the floor, and Alexandrine—spared the killing concentration of fumes by a few extra feet—unconscious on the bed. 175
[Barnes] A London man, aged anything from sixty-two upwards, died yesterday. For most of his life, he enjoyed good health, and had never spent a night in hospital until his final illness. After a slow and impecunious professional start, he achieved more success than he had expected. After a slow and precarious emotional start, he achieved as much happiness as his nature permitted (“Mine has been a happy life, tinged with despair”). Despite the selfishness of his genes, he failed—or rather, declined—to hand them on, further believing that this refusal constituted an act of free will in the face of biological determinism. He wrote books, then he died. Though a satirical friend thought his life was divided between literature and the kitchen (and the wine bottle), there were other aspects to it: love, friendship, music, art, society, travel, sport, jokes. He was happy in his own company as long as he knew when that solitude would end. He loved his wife and feared death. 175
Studies indicate that “of all the professions, medicine is the one most likely to attract people with high personal anxieties about dying.” 177
I understand (I think) that life depends on death…in order for complex organisms like you and me to inhabit this planet, for there to be self-conscious and self-replicating life, and enormous sequence of evolutionary mutations has had to be tried out and discarded. 178
…mothers may feel their mortality more acutely when the children leave home—their biological function has been fulfilled, and all that the universe now needs of them is to die. 179
Camus… “what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport”—specifically to football… 181
…since people imagine themselves with free will, built character and largely consistent beliefs, then this is how the novelist should portray them. But in a few years this might seem the naïve self-justification of a deluded humanist unable to handle the logical consequences of modern thought and science. I am not yet ready to regard myself—or you, or a character in one of my novels—as a distributed neuronal process, let alone replace an “I” or a “he” or a “she” with an “it”… 183
My mother, whenever exasperated by the non-arrival or malfeasance of some goofy handyman or cack-handed service engineer, would remark that she could “write a book” about her experiences with workmen. So she could have done; and how very dull it would have been. It might have contained anecdotes, scenelets, character portraits, satire, even levity; but this would not add up to narrative. And so it is with our lives: one damn thing after another—a gutter replaced, a washing machine fixed—rather than a story. Or (since I meet my GP in concert halls) there is no proper announcement of theme, followed by development, variation, recapitulation, coda, and crunching resolution. There is an occasional heart-lifting aria, much prosaic recitative, but little through-composition. “Life is neither long or short—it merely has longueurs.” 185
When I was a boy, adulthood seemed an inaccessible condition—a mixture of unattainable competences and unenviable anxieties (pensions, dentures, chiropodists); and yet it arrived, though it did not feel from within how it looked from without. Nor did it seem like an achievement. Rather, it felt like conspiracy: I’ll pretend that you’re grown up if you pretend that I am. 186
…is our underlying desire any need for judgment. This is surely one of religion’s gut appeals—and its attraction for Wittgenstein…When we fall in love, we hope—both egotistically and altruistically—that we shall finally, truly seen: judged and approved. 190
For every decade of life after the age of fifty, the brain loses two per cent of its weight; it also takes on a creamy-yellow tinge—“even senescence is colour-coded.” The motor area of our frontal cortex will lose twenty to fifty per cent of its neurons, the visual area fifty per cent, and the physical sensory part about the same…the higher intellectual functions of the brain are much less affected by this widespread cellular morbidity. Indeed, “certain cortical neurons” seem to be become more abundant after we reach maturity, and there is even evidence that the filamentous branchings—the dendrites—of many neurons continue to grow in old people who don’t suffer from Alzheimer’s…From this, “Neurophysiologists may actually have discovered the source of what wisdom we like to think we can accumulate with advancing age.” 195
The truth, as revealed by his doctor’s diary, was that Goethe was “in the grip of a terrible fear and agitation.” The reason for the “horror” of that final day was evident to the doctor: Goethe, the wise Goethe, the man who had everything in perspective, could not avoid the dread… 196
In the first decades of his life, Larkin could sometimes persuade himself that extinction, when it eventually came, might prove a mercy. But by his fifties, his biographer tells us, “The dread of oblivion darkened everything”—and then, “As he entered his sixties his fears grew rapidly.” (203)…Larkin died in a hospital in Hull. A friend, visiting him the day before, said, “If Philip hadn’t been drugged, he would have been raving. He was that frightened.” At 1:24 a.m., a typical deathing hour, he said his last words, to a nurse holding his hand: “I am going to the inevitable.” 204
Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge: I’d like to widen people’s awareness of the tremendous timespan lying ahead—for our planet, and for life itself. Most educated people are aware that we’re the outcome of nearly 4bn years of Darwinian selection, but may tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6bn years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae. 210-211
Stendhal…After suffering a first stroke, he wrote, “I find that there’s nothing ridiculous about dropping dead in the street, as long as one doesn’t do it deliberately.” On 22 March, 1842, after dining at the Foreign Ministry, he got the non-ridiculous end he sought, on the pavement of the Rue Neuve-des-Capucines. He was buried as “Arrigo Beyle, Milanese,” a rebuke to the French who did not read him, and a tribute to the city where the smell of horse dung had moved him almost to tears. And as a man not unprepared for death (he made twenty-one wills), Stendhal composed his own epitaph: Scrisse. Amo. Visse. He wrote. He loved. He lived. 217-218
Nowadays, it costs five euros to visit the church—or as the ticket prefers, the “monumental complex”—of Santa Croce in Florence. You enter not by the west front, as Stendhal did, but on the north side, and are immediately presented with a choice of route and purpose: the left gate for those who wish to pray, the right for tourists, atheists, aesthetes, idlers. The vast and airy nave of (221) this preaching church still contains those tombs of famous men whose presence softened up Stendhal. Among them now is a relative newcomer: Rossini, who is 1863 asked God to grant him paradise. The composer died in Paris five years later and was buried in Pere-Lachaise; but as with Zola, a proud state came and body-snatched him for its pantheon. Whether God chose to grant Rossini paradise depends perhaps on whether or not God has read the Goncourt Journal. “The sins of my old age”? Here is the Journal’s entry for 20 January 1876: “Last night, in the smoking-room at Princesse Mathilde’s, the conversation turned to Rossini. We talked of his priapism, and his taste, in the matter of love, for unwholesome practices; and then of the strange and innocent pleasures the old composer took in his final years. He would get young girls to undress to the waist and let his hands wander lasciviously over their torsos, while giving them the end of his little finger to suck.” / Stendhal wrote the first biography of Rossini in 1824. Two years later, he published Rome, Naples and Florence, in which he described how Henri, or Arrigo, Beyle had come to Florence in 1811. He descended from the Apennines one January morning, he saw “from a far distance” Brunelleschi’s great dome rising above the city, he got down from the coach to enter on foot like a pilgrim, he stood before paintings which thrilled him till he swooned. And we might still believe every word of his account if he had remembered to do one thing: destroy the diary he had kept of that original trip…In 1811 he couldn’t have seen Brunelleschi’s dome from afar for the simple reason that it was dark. He arrived in Florence at five in (222) the morning, “overcome with fatigue, wet, jolted, obliged to maintain a hold on the front of the mail wagon and sleeping while seated in a cramped position.” Unsurprisingly, he went straight to an inn, the Auberge d’Angleterre, and to bed. He left orders to be woken two hours later, but not for touristic purposes: he headed for the post-house and tried to book himself a seat on the next coach to Rome. But that day’s coach was full, and so was the next day’s—and this was the only reason he stayed in Florence for the three days in which he added to the history of aesthetic response. Another incompatibility: the book sets the visit in January; the diary dates it to September…In the memory of 1826, the chapel was unlocked by a friar, and Stendhal sat on the step of a faldstool, his head thrown back against a desk, to gaze at the frescoed ceiling. In the truth of 1811, there is no friar and no faldstool; further, in both 1811 and 1826, and at any date previous or since, the sibyls have been located (223) high on the walls of the chapel, but not on the ceiling. Indeed, the diary of 1811, after praising the Volterranos, continues: “The ceiling of the same chapel is very effective, but my eyesight is not good enough to judge ceilings. It merely appeared to me to be very effective.” (224) That famous episode in the porch of Santa Croce—the fierce palpitation of the heart, the wellspring of life drying up—was not deemed worthy of a diary entry at the time. The nearest approximation to it… “I was dead tired, my feet swollen and pinched in new boots—a little sensation which would prevent God from being admired in all His glory, but I overlooked it in front of the picture of limbo. Mon Dieu, how beautiful it is!”…Time brings not just narrative variation but emotional increase. And if forensic examination appears to diminish the story of Santa Croce, it remains, even in its original, unimproved version, about aesthetic (225) joy being greater than religious rapture. Fatigue and tight boots would have distracted Beyle from God’s glory, had he gone into the church to pray; but the power of art overcame pinched toes and rubbed heels. 226
The steerer was blindfolded. I’m pretty sure we took it in turns to steer and to push; but I suspect that I pushed you faster than you pushed me. I don’t recall any major accident (nor even anyone being pushed into a wall—which in fact would not have been at all easy, given the layout of the garden). I don’t recall your being frightened. I seem to think we thought it was fun, and rather naughty.” / My niece’s initial summary of the game—my brother blindfolding me before pushing me into a wall—might be a child’s shorthand memory, emphasizing what she herself would most have feared; or it might be a subsequent abbreviation or reimagining made in the light of her relationship with her father. 236
My brother remembers a ritual—never witnessed by me—which he called the Reading of the Diaries. Grandma and Grandpa each kept separate diaries, and of an evening would sometimes entertain themselves by reading out loud to one another what they had recorded on that very week several years previously. The entries were apparently of considerable banality but frequent disagreement. Grandpa: “ ‘Friday. Worked in garden. Planted potatoes.’” Grandma: “Nonsense. ‘Rained all day. Too wet to work in garden.’” 6
…I asked, “But you approve of R.?” / “It’s irrelevant,” my brother replied, “whether or not I approve of R.” / “No, it’s not. C. might want you to approve of him.” / “On the contrary, she might want me not to approve of him.” / “But either way, it’s not irrelevant to her whether or not you approve or disapprove.” / He thought this over for a moment. “You’re right,” he said. / You can perhaps tell from the these exchanges that he is the elder brother. 8-9
…my mother telephoned and picked up on the fact that I had described myself as an agnostic. She told me that this was how Dad used to describe himself—whereas she was an atheist. She made it sound as if being an agnostic was a wishy-washy liberal position, as opposed to the truth-and-marked-forces reality of atheism. “What’s all this about death anyway?” she continued. I explained that I didn’t like the idea of it. “You’re just like your father,” she replied. “Maybe it’s your age. When you get to my age you won’t mind so much. I’ve seen the best of life anyway. 9
He died a modern death, in hospital, without his family, attended in his final minutes by a nurse, months—indeed, years—after medical science had prolonged his life to a point where the terms on which it was being offered were unimpressive. 10
Wanting to see her dead came more, I admit, from writerly curiosity than filial feeling… 13
My father had died at the same age. I had always imagined that his would be the harder death, because I had loved him the more, whereas at best I could only be irritatedly fond of my mother. But it worked the other way round… 13
The son of a tobacconist, Alex was reading Wittgenstein at sixteen, and writing poetry which pulsed with ambiguities—double, triple, quadruple, like heart bypasses. He was better than me at English, and took a scholarship to Cambridge, after which I lost sight of him. Down the years I would occasionally imagine his presumed success in one of the liberal professions. I was over fifty when I learnt that such biography-giving was an idle fantasy. Alex had killed himself—with pills, over a woman—in his late twenties, half my life ago. / So I had no faith to lose, only a resistance, which felt more heroic than it was, to the mild regime of God-fearing that an English education entailed: scripture lessons, morning prayers and hymns, the annual Thanksgiving service in St. Paul’s Cathedral. And what was it, apart from the role of Second Shepherd in a nativity play at my primary school. I was never baptized, never sent to Sunday school. I have never been to a normal church service in my life. I do baptisms, weddings, funerals. I am constantly going into churches, but for architectural reasons; and, more widely, to get a sense of what Englishness once was. 15
… “Go on, believe! It does no harm.” This weak-tea version, the weary murmur of a man with a metaphysical headache, comes from Wittgenstein’s notebooks. If you were the Deity, you might be a little unimpressed by such lukewarm endorsement. But there are times, probably, when “it does no harm”—except for not being true, which some might find irreducible, unnegotiable harm. / As an example: some twenty years before he wrote this note, Wittgenstein worked as a schoolmaster in several remote villages of lower Austria. The locals found him austere and eccentric, yet devoted to his pupils; also willing, despite his own religious doubts, to begin and end each day with the paternoster. While teaching at Trattenbach, Wittgenstein took his pupils on a study trip to Vienna. The nearest station was at Gloggnitz, twelve miles away, so the trip began with a pedagogic hike through the intervening forest, with the children being asked to identify plants and stones they had studied in class. In Vienna, they spent two days doing the same with examples of architecture and technology. Then they took the train back to Gloggnitz. By the time it arrived, night was falling. They set off on their return twelve-mile hike. Wittgenstein, sensing that many of the children were frightened, went from one to the other, saying quietly, “Are you afraid? Well, then, you must think only about God.” They were, quite literally, in a dark wood. Go on, believe! It does no harm. And presumably it didn’t. A nonexistent God will at least protect you from nonexistent elves and sprites and wood demons, even if not from existent wolves and bears (and lionesses.) / A Wittgenstein scholar suggests that while the philosopher was not “a religious person,” there was in him “in some sense, the possibility of religion”; though his idea of it was less to do with belief in a creator than with a sense of sin and a desire for judgment. He thought that “Life can educate one to a belief in God”—this is one of his last notes. He also imagined himself being asked the question of whether or not he would survive death, and replying that he couldn’t say: not for the reasons you or I might give, but because “I haven’t a clear idea of what I am saying when I’m saying ‘I don’t cease to exist.’” I shouldn’t think many of us do, except for fundamentalist self-immolators expecting very specific rewards. Though what it means, rather than what it might imply, is surely within our grasp. 22-23
My friend R. recently asked me how often I think about death, and in what circumstances. At least once each waking day, I replied; and then there are the intermittent nocturnal attacks. Mortality often gatecrashes my consciousness when the outside world presents an obvious parallel: as evening falls, as the days shorten, or towards the end of a long day’s hiking. 24
In the 1920s, Sibelius would go to the Kamp restaurant in Helsinki and join the so-called “lemon table”: the lemon being the Chinese symbol of death. He and his fellow-diners—painters, industrialists, doctors, and lawyers—were not just permitted, but required to talk about death. 25
… “Fear of death may be the most intense emotion of all. I sometimes think that there is no deeper feeling.” These views were not publicly expressed. Shostakovich knew that death—unless it came in the form of heroic martyrdom—was not an appropriate subject for Soviet art, that it was “tantamount to wiping your nose on your sleeve in company.” He could not have the Dies Irae blaze from his scores; he had to be musically covert. 27
This is not, by the way, “my autobiography.” Nor am I “in search of my parents.” I know that being someone’s child involves both a sense of nauseated familiarity and large no-go areas of ignorance—at least, if my family is anything to judge by. And though I still wouldn’t mind a transcript of that pouffe’s contents, I don’t think my parents had any rare secrets. Part of what I’m doing—which may seem unnecessary—is trying to work out how dead they are. My father died in 1992, my mother in 1997. 35-36
…Jules Renard, who said: “It is when faced with death that we turn most bookish.” 39
Nowadays, our ambitions have grown more puny. “Courage,” Larkin wrote “Aubade,” his great death-poem, “means not scaring others.” Not back then it didn’t. It meant a great deal more: showing others how to die honourably, wisely, and with constancy. / One of Montaigne’s key instances is the story of Pomponius Atticus, a correspondent of Cicero’s. When Atticus fell ill, and medical attempts to prolong his existence merely prolonged his pain, he decided that the best solution was to starve himself to death. 41
Miraculously, abstinence turned out to be the best cure for his (unnamed) condition; and soon, the sick man was undeniably on the mend. There was much rejoicing and feasting; perhaps the doctors even withdrew their bills. But Atticus interrupted the merriment. Since we all must die one day, he announced, and since I have already made such fine strides in that direction, I have no desire to turn around now, only to start again another time. And so, to the admiring dismay of those around him, Atticus continued to refuse food and went to his exemplary death. 42
He hopes that death, his companion, his familiar, will make its final house-call when he is in the middle of doing something ordinary—like planting his cabbages. 42
…what exactly are you asking for when you complain against death? Do you want an immortality spent on this earth, given the terms and conditions currently applicable? (I see the argument, but how about a bit of immortality? Half? OK, I’ll settle for a quarter.) 43
I asked him to elaborate on his dismissal of the line “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him” as “soppy.” He admits that he isn’t really sure how to take my statement: “I suppose as a way of saying ‘I don’t believe there are any gods, but I wish there were (or perhaps: but I wish I did).’ 44-45
A common response in surveys of religious attitudes is to say something like, “I don’t got to church, but I have my own personal idea of God.” This kind of statement makes me in turn react like a philosopher. Soppy, I cry. You may have your own personal idea of God, but does God have His own personal idea of you? Because that’s what matters. Whether He’s an old man with a white beard sitting in the sky, or a life force, or a disinterested prime mover, or a clockmaker, or a woman, or a nebulous moral force, or Nothing At All, what counts is what He, She, It or Nothing thinks of you rather than you of them. The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque. It also doesn’t matter whether God is just or benevolent or even observant—of which there seems startlingly little proof—only that He exists. 46
Renard never indulges his child alter ego with retrospective self-pity, that emotion (normally arising in adolescence, though it may last for ever) which renders many reworkings of childhood fake. For Renard, a child was “a small, necessary animal, less human than cat.” This remark comes from his masterpiece, the Journal he kept form 1887 until his death in 1910. 48
Francois Renard, however, knows or believes himself to be incurably ill. Four weeks later, he locks the bedroom door, takes his shotgun, and uses a walking stick to press the trigger. He succeeds in firing both barrels, just to make sure. Jules is summoned; he breaks down the door; there is smoke and the smell of powder. At first he thinks his father must be joking; then he is obliged to believe in the sprawled figure, the unseeing eyes, and the “dark place above the waist, like a small extinguished fire.” He takes his father’s hands; they are still warm, still pliant (50)…Jules judges that his father has died heroically, showing Roman virtues. He notes: “On the whole, this death has added to my sense of pride.” Six weeks after the funeral, he concludes: “The death of my father makes me feel as if I had written a beautiful book.” 51
Missing God is focused for me by missing the underlying sense of purpose and belief when confronted with religious art. Is is one of the haunting hypotheticals for the nonbeliever: what would it be like “if it were true”…Imagine hearing the Mozart Requiem in a great cathedral… 54
Pretending to beliefs we don’t have during Mozart’s Requiem is like pretending to find Shakespeare’s horn jokes funny (though some theatre goers still relentlessly laugh). 55
Montaigne’s nearest British equivalent, Sir Thomas Browne, wrote: “For a pagan there might be some motives to be in love with life, but, for a Christian to be amazed at [i.e. terrified of] death, I cannot see how he can escape this dilemma—that he is too sensible of this life, or hopeless of the life to come.” 61
I can’t claim that confronting death (no, that sounds too active, too pretend-heroic—the passive mode is better: I can’t claim that being confronted by death) has given me any greater accommodation with it, let alone made me wiser, or more serious, or more…anything, really. I could try arguing that we cannot truly savour life without a regular awareness of extinction: it’s the squeeze of the lemon, the pinch of salt that intensifies the flavour. But do I really think that my death-denying (or religious) friends appreciate that bunch of flowers/work of art/glass of wine less than I do? No. 65-66
But I repeat and insist that I suffer from rational (yet RATIONAL) fear. The earliest known Dance of Death, painted on a wall of the Cimetiere des Innocents in Paris in 1425, had a text which began “O creature roysonnable/ Qui desires vie eternelle” [O rational creature/ Who wishes for eternal life]. 66
In 1987 an American neuroscientist claimed to have located exactly where in the brain a certain electrical instability triggers religious feelings…In one experiment, fifteen Carmelite nuns were asked to remember their most profound mystical experiences: scans showed electrical activity and blood oxygen levels surging in at least twelve separate regions of their brains. 68
The differences my mother observed in her two sons pleased me more. “When they were boys, if I was ill, Julian climbed into bed and snuggled up to me, while his brother brought me a cup of tea.” Another distinction she reported: my brother once cacked his pants and responded with the words, “It will never happen again”—and it didn’t; whereas, when I failed to control my infant bowels, I was discovered merrily smearing my shit into the cracks between the floorboards. My favourite differentiation, however, was made much later in our mother’s life. By this time both her sons were established in their separate fields. This is how she expressed her pride in them: “One of my sons writes books I can read but can’t understand, and the other writes books I can understand but can’t read.” 69
Fear of death replaces fear of God. But fear of God—an entirely sane early principle, given the hazard of life and our vulnerability to thunderbolts of unknown origin—at least allowed for negotiation. We talked God down from being the Vengeful One and rebranded Him the Infinitely Merciful; we changed Him form Old to New, like the Testaments and the Labour Party. We levered up His graven image, put it on runners, and dragged it to a place where the weather was sunnier. We can’t do the same with death. Death can’t be talked down, or parlayed into anything; it simply declines to come to the negotiating table. 70
Stendhal… “Waiting for God to reveal himself, I believe that his prime minister, Chance, governs this sad world just as well.” (73)…And now he comes to Florence for the first time. He is arriving from Bologna; the coach crosses the Apennines and begins its descent towards the city. “My heart was leaping wildly within me. What utterly childlike excitement!” As the road bends, the cathedral, with Brunelleschi’s famous dome, comes into sight. At (73) the city gate, he abandons the coach—and his luggage—to enter Florence on foot, like a pilgrim. He finds himself at the church of Santa Croce. Here are the tombs of Michelangelo and Galileo; nearby is Canova’s bust of Alfieri. He thinks of the other great Tuscans: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch. “The tide of emotion that overwhelmed me flowed so deep that it was scarce to be distinguished from religious awe.” He asks a friar to unlock the Niccolini Chapel and let him look at the frescoes. He seats himself “on the step of a faldstool, with my head thrown back to rest upon the desk, so that I might let my gaze dwell on the ceiling.” The city and the proximity of its famous children have already put Beyle in a state of near trance. Now he is “absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty”; he attains “the supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion.” The italics are his. / The physical consequence of all this is a fainting fit. “As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart…The wellspring of life dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.” Beyle (who was Stendhal by the time he published this account in Rome, Naples and Florence) could describe his symptoms but not name his condition. Posterity, however, can, since posterity always knows best. Beyle was suffering, we can now tell him, from Stendhal’s Syndrome, a condition identified in 1979 by a Florentine psychiatrist who had noted almost a hundred cases of dizziness and nausea brought on by exposure to the city’s art treasures (74-75)…city confusion, timetable stress, masterpiece anxiety, information overload, and too much hot sun mixed with chilly air-conditioning. The very skeptical might wonder whether Stendhal himself was really suffering from Stendhal’s Syndrome…if you sit with your head back, staring for a long time at a painted wall, and then get to your feet and walk from the cool darkness of a church into the bright, dusty, frenetic swirl of a city, might you not expect to feel a little faint?...who would not understand and envy a man swooning at the Giottos in Santa Croce, the more so as he was seeing them with a mind and eye untrammeled by previous reproduction? The story is true, not least because we want it, we need it to be true. 75
Professor C. of Oxford… “The religion of art makes people worse, because it encourages contempt for those considered inartistic.” There may be something in this, though the larger problem, in Britain at least, is that of contempt from the opposite direction: from the complacent philistine towards those who practice and value the arts. 76
In my second term at Oxford, I had decided to give up modern languages for the more “serious” study of philosophy and psychology…How, I asked him, could I possibly be expected to have any understanding of, or sensible opinions about, a play like Phedre when I had only the remotest experience of the volcanic emotions depicted in it? He gave me a wry, donnish smile: “Well, which of us can ever say that we have?” / At this time, I kept a box of green index cards, onto which I copied epigrams, witticisms, scraps of dialogue, and pieces of wisdom worth preserving. Some of them strike me now as the meretricious generalizations that youth endorses… 83
Maugham… “Beauty is a bore.” 84
During the era of piety, princes and rich burghers used to summon priest and prelate to reassure them of the certainty of heaven and the rewards their prayers and monetary offerings had ensured. The agnostic Maugham now did the opposite: he summoned A. J. Ayer, the most intellectually and socially fashionable philosopher of the day, to reassure him that death was indeed final, and that nothing, and nothingness, followed it. The need for such reassurance might be explained by a passage in The Summing Up. There Maugham relates how, as a young man, he lost his belief in God, but nonetheless retained for a while an instinctive fear of hell, which it took him another metaphysical shrug to dislodge. Perhaps he was still looking over his shoulder. 84-85
Jules Renard imagined just such a parade-ground God, who would keep reminding those who finally made it to heaven: “You aren’t here to have fun, you know.” 88
On another day the wireless would disgorge The Critics, a band of suave aesthetic experts droning on about plays we would never see and books that never came into the house. My brother and I would listen with a kind of stunned boredom, which was not just of the present, but anticipatory: if such opinion-giving and –receiving was what adulthood contained, then it seemed not merely unattainable, but actively undesirable. 90
…will Richard Dawkins die better than our genetic ancestors hundreds or thousands of years ago? Dawkins has expressed the hope that “When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.” Clear enough, if illegal; yet death has an obstinate way of denying us the solutions we imagine for ourselves. 94
His father was a hospital surgeon; the family lived above the shop; Achille Flaubert would often come straight from his operating table to his dining table. The boy Gustave would climb a trellis and peer in at his father instructing medical students how to dissect corpses. He saw bodies covered in flies, and students casually resting their lit cigars on the limbs and trunks they were hacking away at. Achille would glance up, spot his son’s face at the window, and wave him away with his scalpel. 95
In April 1848, when Flaubert was twenty-six, the literary friend of his youth, Alfred Le Poittevin, died…He kept a vigil over his dead friend for two consecutive nights…When the undertakers arrived with the coffin, he kissed his friend on the temple (95) …Twenty-one years after Le Poittevin’s death, Louis Bouilhet, the literary friend of Flaubert’s maturity, died…You might think—if pit-gazing worked—that the previous experiences would make this one more bearable. But Flaubert found that he could not bear to see, watch over, embrace, wrap, or kiss the friend who had been so close that he once called him “my left testicle.”… “I did not dare see him! I feel weaker than I did twenty years ago…I lack any internal toughness. I feel worn out.” 96
Ah, the therapeuto-autobiographical fallacy. However well meant, it irritates me…Nor does writing about death either diminish or increase my fear of it. 97
I expect my departure to have been preceded by severe pain, fear, and exasperation at the imprecise or euphemistic use of language around me. 99
[Before mid-20s] As a young man, I was terrified of flying. The book I would choose to read on a plane would be something I felt appropriate to have found on my corpse. I remember taking Bouvard et Pecuchet on a flight from Paris to London…and I was naturally too scared during the flight to concentrate on a novel whose ironic truths in any case tend to be withheld from younger readers. 105
…Flaubertian self-reminder: “Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” 108
…Voltaire had similarly clung to his own pulse until the moment he slowly shook his head and, a few minutes later, died. An admirable death—with not a priest in sight—worthy of Montaigne’s catalogue. Not that it impressed everyone. Mozart, then in Paris, wrote to his father, “You probably already know that that godless arch-rogue Voltaire has died like a dog, like a beast—that’s his reward!” Like a dog, indeed. 110
Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death. 111
That medieval bird flies from darkness into a lighted hall and back out again. One of the oh-so-sensible arguments against death-anxiety goes like this: if we don’t fear and hate the eternity of time leading up to our brief moment of illuminated life, why therefore should we feel differently about the second spell of darkness, the universe—or at least, a very, very insignificant part of it—was leading up to the creation of something of decided interest…So that darkness had some purpose—at least, from my solipsistic point of view… 114
…my sense of morality is influenced by Christian teaching (or, more exactly, pre-Christian tribal behaviour codified by the religion)… 116
My mother considered quite seriously whether she would rather go deaf or go blind. Preferring one incapacity in advance seemed a superstitious method of ruling out the other. 121
The arrival into New York—the transit from airport to city—involves passing one of the vastest cemeteries I have ever seen. I always half-enjoy this ritual memento mori, probably because I have never come to love New York. All the bustle in that most ever-bustling and narcissistic of cities will come to this; Manhattan mocked by the packed verticality of the headstones. 127
Wharton’s success as a novelist is the more surprising—and the more admirable—given how little her view of life accorded with American hopefulness. She saw small evidence of redemption. She thought life a tragedy—or at best a grim comedy—with a tragic ending. Or, sometimes, just a drama with a dramatic ending. (Her friend Henry James defined life as “a predicament before death.” And his friend Turgenev believed that “the most interesting part of life is death.”) 129
A biographer friend once suggested she take the slightly longer view and write my life. Her husband argued satirically that this would make a very short work as all my days were the same. “Got up,” his version went. “Wrote book. Went out, brought bottle of wine. Came home, cooked dinner. Drank wine.” 129
Eugene O’Kelly was a fifty-three-year-old chairman and CEO of a top American accountancy firm (139)… three months and barely a day longer. / O’Kelly responds to this news like the “goal-driven person” and ultimate corporate competitor that he is. “Just as a successful executive is driven to be as strategic and prepared as possible to ‘win’ at everything, so I was now driven to be as methodical as possible during my last hundred days.” He plans to apply “the skill set of a CEO” to his predicament. He realizes that he must “come up with new goals. Fast.” He tries to “figure out how I as an individual needed to reposition swiftly to adjust to the new circumstances of my life.” He draws up “the final and most important to-do list of my life.” / Priorities, methods, targets. He gets his business and financial affairs in order. He decides how he is going to “unwind” his rela-(140)tionships by creating “perfect moments” and “perfect days.” He begins “transition to the next state.” He plans his own funeral. Ever competitive, he wants to make his death “the best death possible,” and after completing his to-do list, concludes: “Now, I was motivated to ‘succeed’ at death.” 141
Montaigne didn’t die, as he had dreamed, while planting out his cabbage patch. Death came for the sceptic and epicurean, the tolerant deist, the writer of boundless curiosity and learning, while mass was being celebrated in his bedroom: at the exact moment (or so they said) of the elevation of the host. 144
I, or even I, do not produce thoughts; thoughts produce me. 148
At Oxford, after giving up modern languages, my old-fashioned I studied philosophy for a couple of terms, at the end of which it was told it lacked the appropriate brain for the job. 148
Berkley’s. He held that the world of “houses, mountains, rivers and in a word all sensible objects” consists entirely of ideas, sensory experiences. What we like to think of as the real world, out there, corporeal, touchable, linear in time, is just private images—early cinema—unreeling in our heads…Dr. Johnson kicking a stone and crying, “I refute it thus!” 149
Oh yes, and he often wears a kind of eighteenth-century costume designed for him by his younger daughter: knee breeches, stockings, buckle shoes on the lower half; brocade waistcoat, stock, long hair tied in a bow on the upper. Perhaps I should have mentioned this before. 153
The better you know someone, the less well you often see them…They may be so close as to be out of focus…Often, when we talk about someone very familiar, we are referring back to the time when we first properly saw them, when they were held in the most useful—and flattering—light at the correct focal distance. 155
When I search my memory for specific instructions or advice laid down by my mother—for she would have been the lawgiver—I can only recall dicta not specifically aimed at me. For instance: only a spiv wears brown shoes with a blue suit; never move the hands of a clock or watch backwards; don’t put cheese biscuits in the same tin as sweet ones. Hardly urgent copy for the commonplace book. 156
In all my remembered life, he never told me that he loved me; nor did I reply in kind. 161
Hegel, on his deathbed, said, “Only one man ever understood me,” then added, “and he didn’t understand me.” Emily Dickenson said, “I must go on in. The fog is rising.”…Sometimes a last word might be a last gesture: Mozart’s was to mouth the sound of the timpani in his Requiem, whose unfinished score lay open on his bedspread. 166
Zola died in literary character, in a scene of psycho-melodrama worthy of his early friction. He and Alexandrine had returned to Paris from the house with the threatening window. It was a chilly day in late September, so they ordered a fire to be lit in their bedroom. While they were away, work had been done on the roof of the apartment building, and here the narrative offers the reader a choice of interpretations. The chimney leading from their bedroom had been blocked, either by incompetent artisans or—so the conspiracy runs—by murderous anti-Dreyfusards. The Zolas retired to be, locking the door as was their superstitious habit’ the smokeless fuel in the grate gave off carbon monoxide. In the morning, when servants broke down the door, they found the writer dead on the floor, and Alexandrine—spared the killing concentration of fumes by a few extra feet—unconscious on the bed. 175
[Barnes] A London man, aged anything from sixty-two upwards, died yesterday. For most of his life, he enjoyed good health, and had never spent a night in hospital until his final illness. After a slow and impecunious professional start, he achieved more success than he had expected. After a slow and precarious emotional start, he achieved as much happiness as his nature permitted (“Mine has been a happy life, tinged with despair”). Despite the selfishness of his genes, he failed—or rather, declined—to hand them on, further believing that this refusal constituted an act of free will in the face of biological determinism. He wrote books, then he died. Though a satirical friend thought his life was divided between literature and the kitchen (and the wine bottle), there were other aspects to it: love, friendship, music, art, society, travel, sport, jokes. He was happy in his own company as long as he knew when that solitude would end. He loved his wife and feared death. 175
Studies indicate that “of all the professions, medicine is the one most likely to attract people with high personal anxieties about dying.” 177
I understand (I think) that life depends on death…in order for complex organisms like you and me to inhabit this planet, for there to be self-conscious and self-replicating life, and enormous sequence of evolutionary mutations has had to be tried out and discarded. 178
…mothers may feel their mortality more acutely when the children leave home—their biological function has been fulfilled, and all that the universe now needs of them is to die. 179
Camus… “what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport”—specifically to football… 181
…since people imagine themselves with free will, built character and largely consistent beliefs, then this is how the novelist should portray them. But in a few years this might seem the naïve self-justification of a deluded humanist unable to handle the logical consequences of modern thought and science. I am not yet ready to regard myself—or you, or a character in one of my novels—as a distributed neuronal process, let alone replace an “I” or a “he” or a “she” with an “it”… 183
My mother, whenever exasperated by the non-arrival or malfeasance of some goofy handyman or cack-handed service engineer, would remark that she could “write a book” about her experiences with workmen. So she could have done; and how very dull it would have been. It might have contained anecdotes, scenelets, character portraits, satire, even levity; but this would not add up to narrative. And so it is with our lives: one damn thing after another—a gutter replaced, a washing machine fixed—rather than a story. Or (since I meet my GP in concert halls) there is no proper announcement of theme, followed by development, variation, recapitulation, coda, and crunching resolution. There is an occasional heart-lifting aria, much prosaic recitative, but little through-composition. “Life is neither long or short—it merely has longueurs.” 185
When I was a boy, adulthood seemed an inaccessible condition—a mixture of unattainable competences and unenviable anxieties (pensions, dentures, chiropodists); and yet it arrived, though it did not feel from within how it looked from without. Nor did it seem like an achievement. Rather, it felt like conspiracy: I’ll pretend that you’re grown up if you pretend that I am. 186
…is our underlying desire any need for judgment. This is surely one of religion’s gut appeals—and its attraction for Wittgenstein…When we fall in love, we hope—both egotistically and altruistically—that we shall finally, truly seen: judged and approved. 190
For every decade of life after the age of fifty, the brain loses two per cent of its weight; it also takes on a creamy-yellow tinge—“even senescence is colour-coded.” The motor area of our frontal cortex will lose twenty to fifty per cent of its neurons, the visual area fifty per cent, and the physical sensory part about the same…the higher intellectual functions of the brain are much less affected by this widespread cellular morbidity. Indeed, “certain cortical neurons” seem to be become more abundant after we reach maturity, and there is even evidence that the filamentous branchings—the dendrites—of many neurons continue to grow in old people who don’t suffer from Alzheimer’s…From this, “Neurophysiologists may actually have discovered the source of what wisdom we like to think we can accumulate with advancing age.” 195
The truth, as revealed by his doctor’s diary, was that Goethe was “in the grip of a terrible fear and agitation.” The reason for the “horror” of that final day was evident to the doctor: Goethe, the wise Goethe, the man who had everything in perspective, could not avoid the dread… 196
In the first decades of his life, Larkin could sometimes persuade himself that extinction, when it eventually came, might prove a mercy. But by his fifties, his biographer tells us, “The dread of oblivion darkened everything”—and then, “As he entered his sixties his fears grew rapidly.” (203)…Larkin died in a hospital in Hull. A friend, visiting him the day before, said, “If Philip hadn’t been drugged, he would have been raving. He was that frightened.” At 1:24 a.m., a typical deathing hour, he said his last words, to a nurse holding his hand: “I am going to the inevitable.” 204
Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge: I’d like to widen people’s awareness of the tremendous timespan lying ahead—for our planet, and for life itself. Most educated people are aware that we’re the outcome of nearly 4bn years of Darwinian selection, but may tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6bn years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae. 210-211
Stendhal…After suffering a first stroke, he wrote, “I find that there’s nothing ridiculous about dropping dead in the street, as long as one doesn’t do it deliberately.” On 22 March, 1842, after dining at the Foreign Ministry, he got the non-ridiculous end he sought, on the pavement of the Rue Neuve-des-Capucines. He was buried as “Arrigo Beyle, Milanese,” a rebuke to the French who did not read him, and a tribute to the city where the smell of horse dung had moved him almost to tears. And as a man not unprepared for death (he made twenty-one wills), Stendhal composed his own epitaph: Scrisse. Amo. Visse. He wrote. He loved. He lived. 217-218
Nowadays, it costs five euros to visit the church—or as the ticket prefers, the “monumental complex”—of Santa Croce in Florence. You enter not by the west front, as Stendhal did, but on the north side, and are immediately presented with a choice of route and purpose: the left gate for those who wish to pray, the right for tourists, atheists, aesthetes, idlers. The vast and airy nave of (221) this preaching church still contains those tombs of famous men whose presence softened up Stendhal. Among them now is a relative newcomer: Rossini, who is 1863 asked God to grant him paradise. The composer died in Paris five years later and was buried in Pere-Lachaise; but as with Zola, a proud state came and body-snatched him for its pantheon. Whether God chose to grant Rossini paradise depends perhaps on whether or not God has read the Goncourt Journal. “The sins of my old age”? Here is the Journal’s entry for 20 January 1876: “Last night, in the smoking-room at Princesse Mathilde’s, the conversation turned to Rossini. We talked of his priapism, and his taste, in the matter of love, for unwholesome practices; and then of the strange and innocent pleasures the old composer took in his final years. He would get young girls to undress to the waist and let his hands wander lasciviously over their torsos, while giving them the end of his little finger to suck.” / Stendhal wrote the first biography of Rossini in 1824. Two years later, he published Rome, Naples and Florence, in which he described how Henri, or Arrigo, Beyle had come to Florence in 1811. He descended from the Apennines one January morning, he saw “from a far distance” Brunelleschi’s great dome rising above the city, he got down from the coach to enter on foot like a pilgrim, he stood before paintings which thrilled him till he swooned. And we might still believe every word of his account if he had remembered to do one thing: destroy the diary he had kept of that original trip…In 1811 he couldn’t have seen Brunelleschi’s dome from afar for the simple reason that it was dark. He arrived in Florence at five in (222) the morning, “overcome with fatigue, wet, jolted, obliged to maintain a hold on the front of the mail wagon and sleeping while seated in a cramped position.” Unsurprisingly, he went straight to an inn, the Auberge d’Angleterre, and to bed. He left orders to be woken two hours later, but not for touristic purposes: he headed for the post-house and tried to book himself a seat on the next coach to Rome. But that day’s coach was full, and so was the next day’s—and this was the only reason he stayed in Florence for the three days in which he added to the history of aesthetic response. Another incompatibility: the book sets the visit in January; the diary dates it to September…In the memory of 1826, the chapel was unlocked by a friar, and Stendhal sat on the step of a faldstool, his head thrown back against a desk, to gaze at the frescoed ceiling. In the truth of 1811, there is no friar and no faldstool; further, in both 1811 and 1826, and at any date previous or since, the sibyls have been located (223) high on the walls of the chapel, but not on the ceiling. Indeed, the diary of 1811, after praising the Volterranos, continues: “The ceiling of the same chapel is very effective, but my eyesight is not good enough to judge ceilings. It merely appeared to me to be very effective.” (224) That famous episode in the porch of Santa Croce—the fierce palpitation of the heart, the wellspring of life drying up—was not deemed worthy of a diary entry at the time. The nearest approximation to it… “I was dead tired, my feet swollen and pinched in new boots—a little sensation which would prevent God from being admired in all His glory, but I overlooked it in front of the picture of limbo. Mon Dieu, how beautiful it is!”…Time brings not just narrative variation but emotional increase. And if forensic examination appears to diminish the story of Santa Croce, it remains, even in its original, unimproved version, about aesthetic (225) joy being greater than religious rapture. Fatigue and tight boots would have distracted Beyle from God’s glory, had he gone into the church to pray; but the power of art overcame pinched toes and rubbed heels. 226
The steerer was blindfolded. I’m pretty sure we took it in turns to steer and to push; but I suspect that I pushed you faster than you pushed me. I don’t recall any major accident (nor even anyone being pushed into a wall—which in fact would not have been at all easy, given the layout of the garden). I don’t recall your being frightened. I seem to think we thought it was fun, and rather naughty.” / My niece’s initial summary of the game—my brother blindfolding me before pushing me into a wall—might be a child’s shorthand memory, emphasizing what she herself would most have feared; or it might be a subsequent abbreviation or reimagining made in the light of her relationship with her father. 236
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