Nothing to Be Frightened Of (11 page)

“Thirty years is pretty generous,” he replies (well, I had inflated it, for my comfort as much as his). “I expect to be dead within the next fifteen. Am I reconciled to that fact? Am I reconciled to the fact that the splendid hornbeam which I can see through my window will fall and decay within the next fifty years? I’m not sure reconciliation is the
mot juste
: I know it’s going to happen, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t exactly welcome it, but it doesn’t worry me either—and I can’t really imagine anything which would be more welcome (certainly not an eternal quasi-life in the company of saints—what could be less enticing?).”

How quickly he and I—children of the same flesh, products of the same school and university—part company. And though the manner in which my brother discusses mortality is (in both senses) philosophical, though he distances his own final dissolution by a comparison with a hornbeam, I don’t think it is his life in and with philosophy that has wrought the difference. I suspect that he and I are as we are in such matters because we have been like this from the beginning. It doesn’t feel like that, of course. You come into the world, look around, make certain deductions, free yourself from the old bullshit, learn, think, observe, conclude. You believe in your own powers and autonomy; you become your own achievement. So, over the decades, my fear of death has become an essential part of me, and I would attribute it to the exercise of the imagination; while my brother’s detachment in death’s face is an essential part of him, which he probably ascribes to the exercise of logical thought. Yet perhaps I am only this way because of our father, he that way because of our mother. Thanks for the gene, Dad.

“I can’t really imagine anything that would be more welcome [than extinction,]” says my brother. Well, I can imagine all sorts of things more welcome than utter obliteration within fifteen years (his calculation) or thirty (my fraternal gift). How about living longer than that hornbeam, for a start? How about being given the option to die when you feel like it, when you’ve had enough: to go on for two hundred, three hundred years, and then be allowed to utter your own euthanasiastic “Oh, get on with it, then” at a time of your choosing? Why not imagine an eternal quasi-life spent talking to the great philosophers or the great novelists? Or some version of reincarnation—a mixture of Buddhism and
Groundhog Day
—in which you get to live your life again, conscious of how it went the first time, yet able to make adjustments from that rehearsal? The right to try again and do differently. Next time, I might resist my brother’s assertion of philatelic primogeniture and collect something different from Rest of the World. I could become Jewish (or try, or bluff ). I could leave home earlier, live abroad, have children, not write books, plant hornbeams, join a utopian community, sleep with all the wrong people (or at least, some different wrong people), become a drug addict, find God, do nothing. I could discover quite new sorts of disappointment.

My mother told me that Grandpa had once told her that the worst emotion in life was remorse. What, I asked, might he have been referring to? She said she had no idea, as her father had been a man of the utmost probity (no leaky pouffe there). And so the remark—an untypical one for my grandfather—hangs there unanswerably in time. I suffer from little remorse, though it may be on its way, and in the meantime am making do with its close chums: regret, guilt, memory of failure. But I do have a growing curiosity about the unled, the now unleadable lives, and perhaps remorse is currently hiding in their shadow.

Chapter 19

Arthur Koestler, before committing suicide, left a note in which he expressed “some timid hopes for a depersonalised afterlife.” Such a wish is unsurprising—Koestler had devoted many of his last years to parapsychology—but to me distinctly unalluring. Just as there seems little point in a religion which is merely a weekly social event (apart, of course, from the normal pleasures of a weekly social event), as opposed to one which tells you exactly how to live, which colours and stains everything, which is
serious
, so I would want my afterlife, if one ’s on offer, to be an improvement—preferably a substantial one—on its terrestrial predecessor. I can just about imagine slopping around half-unawares in some gooey molecular remix, but I can’t see that this has any advantage over complete extinction. Why have hopes, even timid ones, for such a state? Ah, my boy, but it’s not about what you’d prefer, it’s about what turns out to be true. The key exchange on this subject happened between Isaac Bashevis Singer and Edmund Wilson. Singer told Wilson that he believed in some kind of survival after death. Wilson said that as far as he was concerned, he didn’t want to survive, thank you very much. Singer replied, “If survival has been arranged, you will have no choice in the matter.”

The fury of the resurrected atheist: that would be something worth seeing. And while we’re on the subject, I think the company of saints might be distinctly interesting. Many of them led exciting lives—dodging assassins, confronting tyrants, preaching at medieval street corners, being tortured—and even the quieter ones could tell you about beekeeping, lavender-growing, Umbrian ornithology, and so on. Dom Perignon was a monk, after all. You might have been hoping for a broader social mix, but if it “has been arranged,” then the saints would keep you going for longer than you might expect.

My brother does not fear extinction. “I say that confidently, and not just because it would be irrational to have such a fear” (sorry—interruption—irrational? IRRATIONAL? It’s the most rational thing in the world—how can reason not reasonably detest and fear the end of reason?). “Three times in my life I’ve been convinced I was on the point of dying (the last time I came to in a reanimation ward); I did, on each occasion, have an emotional response (once a burning rage, at myself who had put myself into such a situation, once shame mixed with vexation at the thought that I was leaving my affairs in a mess) but never one of fear.” He has even had a dry run at the deathbed utterance. “The last time I nearly died, my almost last words were, ‘Make sure that Ben gets my copy of Bekker’s Aristotle.’” He adds that his wife found this “insufficiently affectionate.”

He admits that nowadays he thinks of death more than he used to, “in part because old friends and colleagues are dying off.” He regards it calmly once a week; whereas I’ve put in the years and the slog, done the hard yards and the heavy lifting, without acquiring any mellowness or philosophy. I could try to scare up a few arguments in favour of death-awareness but I’m not sure they’d convince. 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 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.

On the other hand, it’s not just a visceral matter. Its manifestations—from skin-puncturing prod to mind-blanking terror, from the brute alarm bell in the unfamiliar hotel room to klaxons shrieking over the city—may be. But I repeat and insist that I suffer from rational (yes RATIONAL) fear. The earliest known Dance of Death, painted on a wall of the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris in 1425, had a text which began “
O créature roysonnable
/
Qui desires vie eternelle
” [O rational creature / Who wishes for eternal life]. Rational fear: my friend the novelist Brian Moore liked to quote the old Jesuit definition of man as “
un être sans raisonnable raison d’être.
” A being without a reasonable reason for being.

Is death-awareness connected to my being a writer? Perhaps. But if so, I don’t want to know, or investigate. I remember the case of a comedian who, after years of psychotherapy, finally understood the reasons why he needed to be funny; and having understood, stopped. So I wouldn’t want to risk it. Though I can imagine one of those would-you-rather choices. “Mr. Barnes, we’ve examined your condition, and we conclude that your fear of death is intimately connected to your literary habits, which are, as for many in your profession, merely a trivial response to mortality. You make up stories so that your name, and some indefinable percentage of your individuality, will continue after your physical death, and the anticipation of this brings you some kind of consolation. And although you have intellectually grasped that you might well be forgotten before you die, or if not, shortly afterwards, and that all writers will eventually be forgotten, as will the entire human race, even so it seems to you worth doing. Whether writing is for you a visceral response to the rational, or a rational response to the visceral, we cannot be sure. But here’s something for you to consider. We have devised a new brain operation which takes away the fear of death. It’s a straightforward procedure which doesn’t require a general anaesthetic—indeed, you can watch its progress on-screen. Just keep an eye on this fiery orange locus and watch its colour gradually fade. Of course, you’ll find that the operation will also take away your desire to write, but many of your colleagues have opted for this treatment and found it most beneficial. Nor has society at large complained about there being fewer writers.”

I’d have to think about it, of course. I might wonder how my backlist would stack up by itself, and whether that next idea is really as good as I imagine. But I hope I’d decline—or at least negotiate, get them to put more in the pot. “How about eliminating not the fear of death but death itself? That would be seriously tempting. You get rid of death and I’ll give up writing. How about
that
for a deal?”

Chapter 20

My brother and I have inherited some things in common. Our four ears have sprouted three deaf aids between them. My deafness is on the left side. Jules Renard,
Journal
, 25 July 1892: “He is deaf in his left ear: he does not hear on the side of the heart.” (Bastard!) When the ear-nose-and-throat specialist diagnosed my condition, I asked if there was anything I might have done to cause it. “You can’t give yourself Ménière’s disease,” he replied. “It’s congenital.” “Oh good,” I said. “Something I can blame my parents for.” Not that I do. They were just doing their genetic duty, passing on what had been passed on to them, all the old stuff, from slime and swamp and cave, the evolution stuff—without which my complaining self would not have come into existence.

A few inches from these congenitally malfunctioning ears there lies, within my own skull, a fear of death, and within my brother’s, its absence. Where, nearby, might religion or its absence lie? In 1987 an American neuroscientist claimed to have located exactly where in the brain a certain electrical instability triggers religious feelings: the so-called “God spot”—a different, even more potent form of G spot. This researcher has also recently devised a “God helmet” which stimulates the temporal lobes with a weak magnetic field and supposedly induces religious states. Valiantly—or foolhardily—he tried it on perhaps the least suggestible person on the planet, Richard Dawkins, who duly reported not a flicker of the Immanent Presence.

Other investigators believe that there is no single God spot to be located. 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. The neuromechanics of faith, though, will neither find, nor prove (or disprove) God, nor establish the underlying reason for our species’ belief in deities. That may come when evolutionary psychology lays out religion’s adaptive usefulness to the individual and group. Though will even this do for God, the great escapologist? Don’t count on it. He will make a tactical retreat, as He has been doing for the last 150 or so years, into the next unscannable part of the universe. “Perhaps the fact that God is incomprehensible is the strongest argument for His existence.”