Is this properly philosophical, or strangely blithe, the assumption that Acceptance—Kübler-Ross’s fifth and final mortal stage—will be available when required? Skip Denial, Anger, Bargaining, and Depression, and just head straight for Acceptance? I am also a little disappointed by “Oh, here I am on my deathbed—this is where I am” as the Last Words of the future (still preferring, for instance, my brother’s “Make sure that Ben gets my copy of Bekker’s Aristotle”). Nor am I quite sure I entirely trust someone who calls a radio studio “a wonderful place to be.”
“That’s what this thing does. And I expect it to do it on its deathbed.” Note the demise here of the personal pronoun. “I” has mutated to “it” and “this thing,” a switch both alarming and instructive. As human character is being rethought, human language must be rethought with it. The newspaper profiler’s world of character description—a fixed spectrum of adjectives, illustrated by some gamey anecdotes—occupies one end of the spectrum; the philosopher’s and the brain scientist’s—no submarine captain in the turret, and all around a sea of loose associativeness—the other. Somewhere in between lies the everyday world of doubting common sense, or common usefulness, which is also where you find the novelist, that professional observer of the amateurishness of life.
In novels (my own included) human beings are represented as having an essentially graspable, if sometimes slippery, character, and motivations which are identifiable—to us, if not necessarily to them. This is a subtler, truer version of the profiler’s approach. But what if it isn’t, actually, at all the case? I would, I suppose, proffer Automatic Defence A: that 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 naive 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” or “this thing”; but I admit the novel currently lags behind probable reality.
Chapter 54
Flaubert said: “Everything must be learnt, from talking to dying.” But who can teach us to die? There are, by definition, no old pros around to talk—or walk—us through it. The other week, I visited my GP. I have been her patient for twenty years or so, though am more likely to run into her at the theatre or concert hall than in her surgery. This time, we are discussing my lungs; the previous time, Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony. She asks what I am up to; I tell her I am writing about death; she tells me she is too. When she e-mails through her paper on the subject, I am at first alarmed: it is full of literary references. Hey, that’s my territory, I think, in a sub-murmur of rivalrous apprehension. Then I remember that this is normal: “When faced with death, we turn bookish.” And happily her points of reference (Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Milosz, Sebald, Heaney, John Berger) rarely overlap with mine.
At one point she discusses Fayum portraits, those Coptic images which strike the modern eye as intensely realistic representations of individual presences. So they doubtless were; but they were not painted to decorate the walls of this life. Like those Cycladic figurines, their purpose was entirely practical and funerary: they were to be attached to a mummified corpse, so that in the next world the spirits of the dead would be able to recognize the new arrival. Except that the next world has turned out, disappointingly, to be the same world, with a few more centuries added on, and its presiding spirits and portrait-scrutinizers have turned out to be us—a very junior version of eternity.
It must have been a strange collaboration, between a sitter preparing for death and an artist elaborating his or her only representation. Was it practical and businesslike, or edged with lachrymose fearfulness (not just about dying; also about whether the image would be accurate enough for the sitter to be recognized)? But it suggests to my GP a parallel, modern, medical transaction. “Is this,” she asks, “what is required of doctor and [dying] patient? If so, how does one find the moment to start?” At which point I realize that, perhaps to our mutual surprise, she and I have already started. She, by sending me her reflections on death, to which I shall respond with this book. If she proves to be my death-doctor, we shall at least have had a long preliminary conversation, and know our areas of disagreement.
Like me, she is a nonbeliever; like Sherwin Nuland, she is appalled at the over-medicalization of dying, at how technology has shunted out wise thoughtfulness, so that death is viewed as shameful failure by patient as well as doctor. She argues for a reconsideration of pain, which is not necessarily a pure enemy, but something the patient can turn to use. She wants more room for “secular shriving,” a time for a drawing-up of accounts, for expressions of forgiveness and—yes—remorse.
I admire what she has written, but (just to get our terminal conversation going early) disagree with her on one key subject. She, like Sherwin Nuland, sees life as a narrative. Dying, which is not part of death but part of life, is the conclusion to that narrative, and the time preceding death is our last opportunity to find meaning in the story that is about to end. Perhaps because my professional days are spent considering what is narrative and what isn’t, I resist this line of thought. Lessing described history as putting accidents in order, and a human life strikes me as a reduced version of this: a span of consciousness during which certain things happen, some predictable, others not; where certain patterns repeat themselves, where the operations of chance and what we may as well for the moment call free will interact; where children on the whole grow up to bury their parents, and become parents in their turn; where, if we are lucky, we find someone to love, and with them a way to live, or, if not, a different way to live; where we do our work, take our pleasure, worship our god (or not), and watch history advance by a tiny cog or two. But this does not in my book constitute a narrative. Or, to adjust: it may be a narrative, but it doesn’t feel like one to me.
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 nor short—it merely has longueurs.”
So if, as we approach death and look back on our lives, “we understand our narrative” and stamp a final meaning upon it, I suspect we are doing little more than confabulating: processing strange, incomprehensible, contradictory input into some kind, any kind, of believable story—but believable mainly to ourselves. I do not object to this atavistic need for narrative—not least since it is how I make my living—but I am suspicious of it. I would expect a dying person to be an unreliable narrator, because what is useful to us generally conflicts with what is true, and what is useful at that time is a sense of having lived to some purpose, and according to some comprehensible plot.
Doctors, priests, and novelists conspire to present human life as a story progressing towards a meaningful conclusion. Dutifully, we divide our lives into sections, just as popular historians like to divide a century into decades and affix a spurious character to each of them. 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 a conspiracy: I’ll pretend that you’re grown up if
you pretend that I am. Then, as acknowledged (or at least unrumbled) adults, we head towards some fuller, maturer condition, when the narrative has justified itself and we are expected to proclaim, or shyly admit, “Ripeness is all!” But how often does the fruit metaphor hold? We are as likely to end up a sour windfall or dried and wizened by the sun, as we are to swell pridefully to ripeness.
Chapter 55
A man writes a book about death. Between the time he thinks of his opening line—“Let’s get this death thing straight”—and the time he types his actual and different opening line, approximately 750,000,000 people in the world will have died. During his writing of the book, a further 75,000,000 or so die. Between his delivering the book to publishers and its appearance, a further 45,000,000 die. When you look at those figures, Edmond de Goncourt’s argument—about any divine bookkeeper being far too overworked if He accorded us all some further existence—feels almost plausible.
In one of my novels I had a character imagine that there must be other possibilities beyond the brute either/or, the ultimate would-you-rather, of 1. God exists, or 2. God doesn’t exist. So there were various alluring heresies, like: 3. God used to exist, but doesn’t anymore; 4. God does exist, but has abandoned us; 8. God did exist, and will exist again, but doesn’t exist at the moment—He is merely taking a divine sabbatical (which would explain a lot); and so on. My character got up to number 15 (there is no God, but there is eternal life) by the time he, and I, reached the end of our imagining powers.
One possibility we didn’t consider was that God is the ultimate ironist. Just as scientists set up laboratory experiments with rats, mazes, and pieces of cheese placed behind the correct door, so God might have set up His own experiment, with us playing rat. Our task is to locate the door behind which eternal life is hidden. Near one possible exit we hear distant ethereal music, near another smell a whiff of incense; golden light gleams around a third. We press against all these doors, yet none of them yields. With increasing urgency—for we know that the cunning box we find ourselves in is called mortality—we try to escape. But what we don’t understand is that our non-escaping is the whole point of the experiment. There are many fake doors, but no real one, because there is no eternal life. The game thought up by God the ironist is this: to plant immortal longings in an undeserving creature and then observe the consequences. To watch these humans, freighted with consciousness and intelligence, rushing around like frantic rats. To see how one group of them instructs everyone else that their door (which even they can’t open) is the only correct one, and then perhaps starts killing anyone who puts money on a different door. Wouldn’t that be fun?
The experimenting, ironic, games-playing God. Why not? If God made man, or man made God, in His or his own image, then homo ludens implies Deus ludens. And the other favourite game He gets us to play is called Does God Exist? He gives various clues and arguments, drops hints, appoints agents provocateurs on both sides (didn’t that Voltaire do a good job?), then sits back with a beatific smile on His face and watches us try to work it out. And don’t think that a quick and craven acceptance—Yes, God, we always knew you were there from the start, before anyone else said so, You’re the man!—will cut any ice with this fellow. If God were a class act, I suspect He would approve of Jules Renard. Some of the faithful confused Renard’s typically French anti-clericalism with atheism. To which he replied:
You tell me that I am an atheist, because we do not each of us seek God in the same way. Or rather, you believe that you’ve found Him. Congratulations. I am still searching for Him. And I’ll carry on searching for the next ten or twenty years, if He grants me life. I fear not finding Him, but I’ll carry on searching all the same. He might be grateful for my attempt. And perhaps He will have pity on your smug confidence and your lazy, simple-minded faith.
The God-game and the Death-maze fit together, of course. They make a three-dimensional puzzle of the sort which attracts those tired of the mere simplicities of chess. God, the vertical game, intersects with Death, the horizontal one, making up the biggest puzzle of all. And we scurry squeakingly up ladders that end in midair, and rush round corners which lead only to cul-de-sacs. Does that feel familiar? And you can almost believe that God—this kind of God—was reading that journal entry of Renard’s: “And I’ll carry on searching for the next ten or twenty years, if He grants me life.” Presumptuous man! And so God granted him six and a half years: neither niggardly nor indulgent; just about fair. Fair in God’s eyes, that is.
If as a man I fear death, and if as a novelist I professionally seek the contrary view, I should learn to argue in favour of death. One way of doing so is to make the alternative—eternal life—seem undesirable. This has been tried before, of course. That’s one of the problems with death: almost everything’s been tried before. Swift had his Struldbruggs, born with a red mark on their foreheads; Shaw, in Back to Methuselah, his Ancients, born from eggs and attaining adulthood at four. In both cases the gift of eternity proves wearisome and the ever-continuing lives are thinned to emptiness; their owners—their endurers—yearn for the comfort of death and are cruelly denied it. This seems to me a skewed and propagandist take, rather too evidently designed to console the mortal. My GP points me to a subtler version, Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Mr. Cogito and Longevity.” Mr. Cogito “would like to sing / the beauty of the passage of time”; he welcomes his wrinkles, he refuses life-extending elixirs, “He is delighted by lapses of memory / he was tormented by memory”—in short, “immortality since childhood / put him in a state of trembling fear.” Why should the gods be envied, Herbert asks, and answers wryly, “for celestial draughts / for a botched administration / for unsatiated lust / for a tremendous yawn.”
The stance is appealing, even if most of us can imagine improving the administrative workings of Mount Olympus, and wouldn’t be too bored either by celestial draughts or a little more lust-satisfying. But the attack on eternity is—as it has to be—an attack on life; or at least, a celebration of, and expression of relief at, its transience. Life is full of pain and suffering and fear, whereas death frees us from all this. Time, Herbert says, is Eternity’s way of showing us mercy. Think of all this stuff going on ceaselessly: who wouldn’t pray for an end to it? Jules Renard agreed: “Imagine life without death. Every day you’d want to kill yourself from despair.”
Leaving aside the problem of eternity’s eternalness (which could, I think, be fixed—given time), one of the attractions of old-fashioned, God-arranged death-survival—apart from the obvious, spectacular one of not dying—is our underlying desire and need for judgement. This is surely one of religion’s gut appeals—and its attraction for Wittgenstein. We spend our lives only partially seeing ourselves and others, and being partially seen by them in return. When we fall in love, we hope—both egotistically and altruistically—that we shall be finally, truly seen: judged and approved. Of course, love does not always bring approval: being seen may just as well lead to a thumbs-down and a season in hell (the problem, and the paradox, lies in the lover having enough of a sense of judgement to choose a beloved with such a reciprocal sense of judgement as to approve of the lover). In the old days, we could comfort ourselves that human love, even if brief and imperfect, was but a foretaste of the wonder and perfect vision of divine love. Now it’s all that we’ve got, and we must make do with our fallen status. But still we long for the comfort, and the truth, of being fully seen. That would make for a good ending, wouldn’t it?
So perhaps we could put in for just the Judgement, and skip the heaven part—which in any case might contain that upbraiding God of Renard’s imagination: “You aren’t here to have fun, you know!” Perhaps we don’t need the full deal. Because—possible God scenario number 16b—consider for a moment any sensible God’s response to the dossier of our life. “Look,” He might say, “I’ve read the papers, and I’ve listened to the pleas of your most distinguished divine advocate. You certainly tried to do your best (and by the way, I did grant yo
u free will, whatever those provocateurs have been telling you). You were a dutiful child and a good parent, you gave to charity, you helped a blind dog across a road. You did as well as any human being can be expected to, given the material from which you’re made. You want to be seen and approved? Here, I put my SEEN & APPROVED stamp on your life, your dossier, and your forehead. But really, let’s be honest with one another: do you think you deserve eternal life as a reward for your human existence? Doesn’t that strike you as a gross jackpot to win for such a trifling fifty-to-a-hundred-year investment? I’m afraid Somerset Maugham was right about your species not being cut out for it.”
It would be hard to disagree with this. If arguments about the tedium of eternity and the pain of life fail to convince, the Argument from Unworthiness remains persuasive. Even granted a Merciful—not to say, Soppy—Deity, can we objectively claim there would be much point to our perpetuation? It might be flattering to make the occasional exception—Shakespeare, Mozart, Aristotle, over there, behind the velvet rope, the rest of you down this trapdoor—but it wouldn’t make much sense, would it? There’s a one-size-fits-all thing about life, and no going back on the specifications.
Chapter 56
My parents’ ashes were blown by the Atlantic wind gusting in on the French coast; my grandparents were dispersed at the crematorium—unless they were urned and mislaid. I have never visited the grave of a single member of my family, and doubt I ever shall unless my brother obliges me (he plans to be buried in his garden, within the sound of cropping llamas). Instead, I have visited the graves of various non-blood relatives: Flaubert, Georges Brassens, Ford Madox Ford, Stravinsky, Camus, George Sand, Toulouse-Lautrec, Evelyn Waugh, Degas, Jane Austen, Braque . . . Quite a few of them were hard to find, and there was hardly a queue or a flower at any of their tombs. Camus would have been unlocatable except for the presence of his wife in a better-tended plot beside him. Ford took an hour and a half to track down in a vast clifftop cemetery in Deauville. When I eventually found his low, simple slab, the name and dates were almost illegible. I squatted down and cleaned out the lichened chisel-cuts with the keys to my rental car, scraping and flicking until the writer’s name stood clear again. Clear, yet odd: whether it was the French mason’s fault for leaving inadequate gaps, or something in the way I had spruced it up, but the triple name now seemed to split differently. FORD, it began correctly, but then continued MAD OXFORD. Perhaps my perception was influenced by remembering Lowell’s description of the English novelist as “an old man mad about writing.”