Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Chapter 60
We may allow Death, like God, to be an occasional ironist, but shouldn’t nevertheless confuse them. The essential difference remains: God might be dead, but Death is well alive.
Death as ironist: the locus classicus is the 1,000-year-old story I first came across when reading Somerset Maugham. A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant out to buy provisions. In the market the man is jostled by a woman; turning, he recognizes her as Death. He runs home pale and trembling, and pleads for the loan of his master’s horse: he must go at once to Samarra and hide where Death will never find him. The master agrees; the servant rides off. The master himself then goes down to the market, accosts Death, and rebukes her for threatening his servant. Oh, replies Death, but I made no threatening gesture—that was just surprise. I was startled to see the fellow in Baghdad this morning, given that I have an appointment with him in Samarra tonight.
And here is a more modern story. Pavel Apostolov was a musicologist, composer for brass band, and lifelong persecutor of Shostakovich. During the Great Patriotic War he had been a colonel commanding a regiment; afterwards, he became a key member of the Central Committee’s music section. Shostakovich said of him: “He rode in on a white horse, and did away with music.” In 1948, Apostolov’s committee forced the composer to recant his musical sins, and drove him close to suicide.
Twenty years later, Shostakovich’s death-haunted 14th Symphony was given a “closed premiere” in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire. This was in effect a private vetting by Soviet musical experts, with no danger of the new work infecting the greater public. Before the concert Shostakovich addressed the audience. The violinist Mark Lubotsky remembered him saying: “Death is terrifying, there is nothing beyond it. I don’t believe in life beyond the grave.” Then he asked the audience to be as quiet as possible because the performance was being recorded.
Lubotsky was sitting next to a female administrator of the Composers’ House; beyond her was an elderly, bald man. The symphony had reached its intensely quiet fifth movement when the man jumped up, banged his seat loudly, and rushed out of the hall. The administrator whispered, “What a bastard! He tried to destroy Shostakovich in 1948, but failed. He still hasn’t given up, and he’s gone and wrecked the recording on purpose.” It was, of course, Apostolov. What those present didn’t realize, however, was that the wrecker was himself being wrecked—by a heart attack which was to prove fatal. The “sinister symphony of death,” as Lubotsky called it, was in fact grimly playing him out.
The Samarra story shows how we used to think of death: as a stalker on the prowl, watching and waiting to strike; a blackclad figure with scythe and hourglass; something out there, personifiable. The Moscow story shows death as it normally is: what we bear within us all the time, in some piece of potentially berserk genetic material, in some flawed organ, in the time-stamped machinery of which we are made up. When we lie on that deathbed, we may well go back to personifying death, and think we are fighting illness as if it were an invader; but we shall really just be fighting ourselves, the bits of us that want to kill the rest of us. Towards the end—if we live long enough—there is often a competition among our declining and decaying parts as to which will get top billing on our death certificate. As Flaubert put it, “No sooner do we come into this world than bits of us start dropping off.”
The bit of Jules Renard that did for him was his heart. He was diagnosed with emphysema and arteriosclerosis, and began his last year au lit et au lait (bed and milk—two and a half litres a day). He said: “Now that I am ill, I find I want to make some profound and historic utterances, which my friends will subsequently repeat; but then I get too over-excited.” He teasingly gave his sister responsibility for having his bust erected in the little square in Chitry-les-Mines. He said that writers had a better, truer sense of reality than doctors. He felt his heart was behaving like a buried miner, knocking at irregular intervals to signal that it was still alive. He felt that parts of his brain were being blown away like a dandelion clock. He said: “Don’t worry! Those of us who fear death always try to die as stylishly as possible.” He said: “Paradise does not exist, but we must nonetheless strive to be worthy of it.” The end came in Paris, on 22 May 1910; he was buried at Chitry four days later, without benefit of clergy, like his father and brother before him. At his writerly request, no words were spoken over his body.
Too many French deaths? Very well, here’s a good old British death, that of our national connoisseur of mortal terror, Philip Larkin. 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.” So much for my friend G.’s reassurance that things get better after sixty. In the year that was to contain his death, Larkin wrote to a fellow poet, “I don’t think about death all the time, though I don’t see why one shouldn’t, just as you might expect a man in a condemned cell to think about the drop all the time. Why aren’t I screaming?” he wondered, referring back to his poem “The Old Fools.”
Larkin died in 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.” Larkin was hardly a Francophile (though more cosmopolitan than he affected); but you could, if you wished, take this as an allusion to, and correction of, Rabelais’ supposed deathbed utterance; “I am going to seek a Great Perhaps.”
Larkin’s death can do nothing but chill. Pit-gazing led not to calm, but to increased terror; and though he feared death, he did not die stylishly. Did Renard? Given the discretion of French biography, there are no specific details; however, one friend, Daudet’s son Léon, wrote that he showed “wonderful courage” in his last illness. Daudet concluded: “Good writers, like good soldiers, know how to die, whereas politicians and doctors are afraid of death. Everyone can corroborate this remark by looking around them. Though there are, of course, exceptions.”
Here is the old argument, as phrased by Renard when he was young and in good health: “Death is sweet; it delivers us from the fear of death.” Is this not a comfort? No, it is a sophistry. Or rather, further proof that it will take more than logic, and rational argument, to defeat death and its terrors.
Chapter 61
After we die, the hair and the fingernails continue spookily to grow for a while. We all know that. I’ve always believed it, or half-believed it, or half-assumed there must be “something in it”: not that we turn into shock-heads with vampiric fingernails as we lie in our coffins, but, well, perhaps a millimetre or two of hair and nail. Yet what “we all know” is usually wrong, in part if not whole. As my friendly thanatologist Sherwin Nuland points out, the matter is simple and incontrovertible. When we die, we stop breathing; no air, no blood; no blood, no possible growth. There might be a brief flicker of brain activity after the heart ceases to beat; but that’s all. Perhaps this particular myth springs from our fear of live burial. Or perhaps it’s based on honest misobservation. If the body appears to shrink—indeed, does shrink—after death, then the flesh of the fingers might pull back, giving the illusion of nail growth; while if the face looks smaller, this might have the effect of giving you bigger hair.
Being wrong: my brother in error. After our mother’s death, he took our parents’ ashes to the Atlantic coast of France, where they had often holidayed. He and his wife scattered them on the dunes with the help of J., our parents’ closest French friend. They read “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun” from Cymbeline (“Golden lads and girls all must / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust”) and Jacques Prévert’s poem “Les Escargots qui vont à l’enterrement”; my brother pronounced himself “strangely moved” by the event. Later, over dinner, conversation turned to our parents’
annual visits to that part of France. “I remember being staggered,” my brother told me, “when J. described how every night Father had kept them up to the early hours with his anecdotes and lively conversation. I can’t remember him ever speaking after they moved to that frightful bungalow, and I had imagined that he had forgotten how to be amusing. But evidently I was quite mistaken.” The best explanation I can offer is that our father’s French, being superior to our mother’s, enabled him for those few weeks of the year to gain linguistic and social primacy; either that, or our mother, when abroad, might deliberately have become a more conventionally listening wife (however unlikely that sounds).
Being wrong: an error of my own in return. I was breastfed, my brother bottle-fed: from this I once deduced the bifurcation of our natures. But one of my last visits to my mother produced an uncharacteristic moment of near-intimacy. There had been a report in the newspapers concluding that breastfed children were more intelligent than bottle-fed ones. “I read that as well,” said Ma, “and I laughed. Nothing wrong with my two, I thought.” And then—under cross-examination—she confirmed that I had no more been breastfed than my brother. I didn’t ask her reason: whether a determination to give us an equal start in life, or a squeamishness at a potentially messy business (“Mucky pup!”). Except that it was still not exactly the same start, for she mentioned that we had been fed on different formulae. She even told me the names on the bottles, which I promptly forgot. A theory of temperament based on different brands of commercial baby-milk? That would be pretty tendentious, even I would admit. And nowadays I don’t consider my brother’s bringing of tea to our mother’s sickbed any less warm-hearted than my own self-indulgent (and perhaps lazy) blanket-snuggling.
And here is a more complicated error, if equally long-term. P., the French assistant who told tales of Mr. Beezy-Weezy, never came back to England; but his year with us was memorialized by the two small, unframed landscapes he gave my parents. They had a rather dark, Dutch feel to them: one showed a tumbledown bridge across a river, with foliage cascading from the parapet; the other, a windmill against a rowdy sky with three white-headdressed women picnicking in the foreground. You could tell they were artistically done because of the thick brushstrokes used in river, sky, and meadow. During my childhood and adolescence, these two paintings hung in the sitting room; later, at the “frightful bungalow,” they presided over the dining table. I must have glanced at them regularly for fifty years and more, without ever asking myself, or my parents, where exactly P. had set up his box of oils. France—his native Corsica, perhaps—Holland, England?
When I was house-clearing after my mother’s death, I found in a drawer two postcards showing exactly the same two views. My first instinct was to assume that they had been specially printed for P. to advertise his work: he always had a beretful of theoretically money-making schemes. Then I turned them over and realized that they were commercially produced art cards of typically Breton scenes: “Vieux Moulin à Cléden” and “Le Pont fleuri.” What I had all my life imagined to be competent originality was merely competent copying. And then there was a further twist. The cards were signed “Yvon” in the bottom right-hand corner, as if by the artist. But “Yvon” turned out to be the name of the card company. So the pictures had been produced in the first place solely in order to be turned into postcards—whereupon P. had turned them back into the “original” paintings they had never been. A French theorist would have been delighted by all this. I hastened to tell my brother of our fifty-year error, expecing him to be equally amused. He wasn’t at all: for the simple reason that he had a clear memory of P. painting the pictures, “and of thinking how much cleverer it was to copy than to make something up out of your own head.”
Such factual corrections are easily made, and may even feel mentally refreshing. It will be harder to face error about perceptions and judgements you have come to look upon as your own achievements. Take death. For most of my sentient life I’ve known the vivid dread, and also felt fully able—despite what Freud maintained—to imagine my own eternal nonexistence. But what if I am quite wrong? Freud’s contention, after all, was that our unconscious mind remains doggedly convinced of our immortality—a thesis irrefutable by its very nature. So perhaps what I think of as pit-gazing is only the illusion of truth-examination because deep down I do not—cannot—believe in the pit; and this illusion may even continue until the very end if Koestler is right about our consciousness splitting when we are in extremis.
And there’s another way of being wrong: what if the dread we feel in advance—which seems to us so absolute—turns out to be as nothing compared to the real thing? What if our void-imaginings are but the palest rehearsal for what we experience—as Goethe found out—in the final hours? And what, further, if the approach of death overwhelms all known language, so that we cannot even report the truth? A sense of having been wrong all the time: well, Flaubert did say that contradiction is the thing that keeps sanity in place.
And beyond death, God. If there were a games-playing God, He would surely get especial ludic pleasure from disappointing those philosophers who had convinced themselves and others of His nonexistence. A. J. Ayer assures Somerset Maugham that there is nothing, and nothingness, after death: whereupon they both find themselves players in God’s little end-of-the-pier entertainment called Watch the Fury of the Resurrected Atheist. That’s a neat would-you-rather for the God-denying philosopher: would you rather there was nothing after death, and you were proved right, or that there was a wonderful surprise, and your professional reputation was destroyed?
“Atheism is aristocratic,” Robespierre declared. The great twentieth-century British embodiment of this was Bertrand Russell—helped, no doubt, by the fact that he was aristocratic. In old age, with his unruly white hair, Russell looked, and was treated, like a wise man halfway to godhead: a one-man Any Questions? panel in himself. His disbelief never wavered, and friendly provocateurs took to asking him how he would react if, after a lifetime of propagandizing atheism, he turned out to be wrong. What if the pearly gates were neither a metaphor nor a fantasy, and he found himself faced by a deity he had always denied? “Well,” Russell used to reply, “I would go up to Him, and I would say, ‘You didn’t give us enough evidence.’”
Chapter 62
Psychologists tell us we exaggerate the stability of our past beliefs. Perhaps this is a way of asserting our shaky selfhood; also, of congratulating ourselves, as on a greater achievement, when we rethink those beliefs—just as we take pride in our acquisition of wisdom after those extra dendrites start sprouting. But apart from the constant, if unmonitored, flux of our self, or our selfness, there are times when the whole world, which we like to imagine so solid around us, suddenly lurches: times when “getting it wrong” hardly covers the cosmic shift. The moment of that first, personal réveil mortel; the moment—not necessarily contemporaneous—when we grasp that everyone else will die too; the realization that human life itself will end, as the sun boils away the oceans; and then, beyond that, planet death. All this we take on board, trying to keep our balance as we do.
But there is something else, even more vertiginous, to consider. We are, as a species, inclined to historical solipsism. The past is what has led to us; the future is what is being created by us. We claim ownership, triumphantly, of the best of times, and also, self-pityingly, of the worst of times. We tend to confuse our scientific and technological progress with moral and social progress. And we forget a little too easily that evolution is not just a process which has brought the race to its current admirable condition, but one which logically implies evolution away from us.
Yet how far, on a practical basis, do we look back, and how far ahead? I think I can see with reasonable clarity and breadth back to about the middle of the nineteenth century (in my own Western European culture, of course). Beyond that there are individual geniuses, moral and artistic exemplars, key ideas, intellectual movements, and pieces of historical action, but only here and
there, rarely part of a continuum; and my reverse-looking runs out at, say, those Cycladic figurines of 3,000–2,000 bc. My forward looking certainly goes no further than the same basic hundred and fifty years or so; it is cautious, unfocused, and low in its expectations of posterity.
Chekhov was the great understander, and dramatizer, of our two-directional gaze. He specialized in defeated idealists who once dreamed of a better life, but are now becalmed in the present and fearful of the future. As a Chekhov play nears its end, a character will timidly express the hope that posterity may enjoy a less painful life and look back with tenderness on such forlorn predecessors. Knowing chuckles and superior sighs can sometimes be heard from the posterity that makes up the audience: the soft sound of forgiveness cut with an ironic recognition of what has actually happened in the intervening century—Stalinism, mass murder, gulags, brutal industrialization, the felling and poisoning of all those forests and lakes so mournfully invoked by Dr. Astrov and his soulmates, and the handing-over of music to the likes of Pavel Apostolov.
But as we look back at the tunnel-vision dupes of yesteryear, we tend to forget about our successors looking back at us, and judging our self-absorption for what it is worth—worth to them, not to us. What understanding, what tenderness, what forgiveness for us? What about our posterity? If we consider the question at all, our timescale is likely to be Chekhovian: a generation or two, perhaps a century. And those we imagine judging us will not, we presume, be so very different from us, because from now on the planet’s future is going to be about fine-tuning the human animal: improving our moral and social senses, tamping down our aggressive habits, defeating poverty and disease, outwitting climate change, extending the human lifespan, and so on.