Nothing to Be Frightened Of (10 page)

They are images of singular purity, gravity, and beauty, which come at you like a quiet, sustained note heard across a hushed concert hall. From the moment you see one of these forms, most no higher than a handspan, rising before you, you seem to understand them aesthetically; and they appear to collude in this, urging you to bypass any historico-archaeological wall information. This is partly because they evoke so clearly their modernist descendants: Picasso, Modigliani, Brancusi. Both evoke, and surpass: it is good to see those admirable tyrants of modernism being made to look less original by a community of unknown Cycladic carvers; good also to be reminded that the history of art is circular as well as linear. When this brief moment of vaguely pugilistic self-congratulation has passed, you settle into, and open yourself up to, the tranquillity and symbolic withholdingness of the figures. Now, different comparisons come to mind: Piero or Vermeer. You are in the presence of a stately simplicity, and a transcendent calm which seems to contain all the depths of the Aegean, and offer a rebuke to our frantic modern world. A world which has increasingly admired these items, and so desired more of them than can possibly exist. Forgery, like hypocrisy, is the homage vice pays to virtue, and in this case much homage has been paid.

But what exactly have you, or rather I—yes, I’d better take the blame for this one—been looking at? And were my reactions, however pantingly authentic, relevant to the objects in front of me? (Or do aesthetic objects, over time, become, or dwindle into, our reactions to them?) That all-over pale creaminess which lends such an air of serenity would not originally have existed: the heads, at least, would have been vibrantly painted. The minimalist—and proto-modernist—incising is at least in part a practical consequence of the marble being extremely hard to carve. The vertical presence—the way these small images rise to meet us on tiptoe, and thereby seem to calmly dominate us—is a curatorial invention, since most were intended to be lain down horizontally. As for the rebuking tranquillity they emanate, it is rather the stillness and rigidity of the tomb. We may look at Cycladic figurines aesthetically—we cannot do otherwise—but their function was as grave goods. We value them by displaying them in museums under carefully arranged light; their creators would have valued them by burying them in the ground, invisible to all except the spirits of the dead. And what exactly—or even roughly—did they believe, the people who produced such objects? Dunno.

Chapter 16

The art, of course, is only a beginning, only a metaphor, as it always is. Larkin, visiting an empty church, wonders what will happen when “churches fall completely out of use.” Shall we “keep / A few cathedrals chronically on show” (that “chronically” always produces a burn of envy in this writer), or “Shall we avoid them as unlucky places”? Larkin concludes that we shall still—always—be drawn towards such abandoned sites, because “someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious.”

Is this what underlies the sense of Missing? God is dead, and without Him human beings can at last get up off their knees and assume their full height; and yet this height turns out to be quite dwarfish. Emile Littré, lexicographer, atheist, materialist (and translator of Hippocrates), concluded that “Man is a most unstable compound, and the Earth a decidedly inferior planet.” Religion used to offer consolation for the travails of life, and reward at the end of it for the faithful. But above and beyond these treats, it gave human life a sense of context, and therefore seriousness. Did it make people behave better? Sometimes; sometimes not; believers and unbelievers have been equally ingenious and vile in their criminality. But was it true? No. Then why miss it?

Because it was a supreme fiction, and it is normal to feel bereft on closing a great novel. In the Middle Ages, they used to put animals on trial—locusts that destroyed crops, death-watch beetles that munched church beams, pigs that dined off drunkards lying in ditches. Sometimes the animal would be brought before the court, sometimes (as with insects) necessarily tried
in absentia.
There would be a full judicial hearing, with prosecution, defence, and a robed judge, who could hand down a range of punishments—probation, banishment, even excommunication. Sometimes there was even judicial execution: a pig might be hanged by the neck until it was dead by a gloved and hooded officer of the court.

It all seems—to us, now—extravagantly daft, an expression of the inaccessible medieval mind. And yet it was perfectly rational, and perfectly civilized. The world was made by God, and therefore all that happened within it was either an expression of divine purpose, or a consequence of God granting free will to His creation. In some cases, God might employ the animal kingdom to rebuke His human creation: for instance, by sending a punitive plague of locusts, which the court was therefore legally bound to find innocent. But what if a stupefied drunkard fell into a ditch, had half his face eaten off by a pig, and the deed could not be interpreted as divinely intended? Another explanation must be found. Perhaps the pig had been possessed by a devil, which the court might instruct to depart. Or perhaps the pig, while lacking free will itself, might still be held causally responsible for what had happened.

To us, this might appear further proof of man’s ingenious beastliness. Yet there is another way of looking at it: as raising the status of the animals. They were part of God’s creation and God’s purpose, not merely put on earth for Man’s pleasure and use. The medieval authorities brought animals to court and seriously weighed their delinquencies; we put animals in concentration camps, stuff them with hormones, and cut them up so that they remind us as little as possible of something that once clucked or bleated or lowed. Which world is the more serious? Which the more morally advanced?

Bumper stickers and fridge magnets remind us that Life Is Not a Rehearsal. We encourage one another towards the secular modern heaven of self-fulfilment: the development of the personality, the relationships which help define us, the status-giving job, the material goods, the ownership of property, the foreign holidays, the acquisition of savings, the accumulation of sexual exploits, the visits to the gym, the consumption of culture. It all adds up to happiness, doesn’t it—doesn’t it? This is our chosen myth, and almost as much of a delusion as the myth that insisted on fulfilment and rapture when the last trump sounded and the graves were flung open, when the healed and perfected souls joined in the community of saints and angels. But if life
is
viewed as a rehearsal, or a preparation, or an anteroom, or whichever metaphor we choose, but at any rate as something contingent, something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious. Those parts of the world where religion has drained away and there is a general acknowledgement that this short stretch of time is all we have, are not, on the whole, more serious places than those where heads are still jerked by the cathedral’s bell or the minaret’s muezzin. On the whole, they yield to a frenetic materialism; although the ingenious human animal is well capable of constructing civilizations where religion coexists with frenetic materialism (where the former might even be an emetic consequence of the latter): witness America.

So what, you might reply. All that matters is what is true. Would you prefer to bow down before codswallop and pervert your life at the whim of a priesthood, all in the name of a supposed seriousness? Or would you prefer to grow to your full dwarfishness, and indulge all your trivial wants and desires, in the name of truth and freedom? Or is this a false opposition?

My friend J. remembers the work we heard at that concert some months ago: a Haydn Mass. When I allude to our conversation afterwards, he smiles gnomically. So I ask in my turn, “How many times did you think of our Risen Lord during that piece?” “I think of him constantly,” J. replies. Since I can’t tell whether he is being entirely serious or entirely frivolous, I put a question I can’t remember putting to any of my adult friends before. “Are you—to what extent are you—religious?” Best to get this clear after thirty years of knowing him. A long, low chuckle: “I am irreligious.” Then he corrects himself: “No, I am
very
irreligious.”

Chapter 17

Montaigne observed that “religion’s surest foundation is the contempt for life.” To have a low opinion of this rented world was logical, indeed essential, for a Christian: an overattachment to the earth—let alone a desire for some form of terrestrial immortality—would have been an impertinence to God. 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.” Therefore Browne honours anyone who despises death: “Nor can I highly love any that is afraid of it: this makes me naturally love a soldier, and honour those tattered regiments that will die at the command of a sergeant.”

Browne also notes that “It is a symptom of melancholy to be afraid of death, yet sometimes to desire it.” Larkin again, a melancholic defining perfectly the fear of death: “Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere, / And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.” And elsewhere, as if in confirmation of Browne: “Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.” This line perplexed me when I first read it. I am certainly melancholic myself, and sometimes find life an overrated way of passing the time; but have never wanted not to be myself anymore, never desired oblivion. I am not so convinced of life’s nullity that the promise of a new novel or a new friend (or an old novel or an old friend), or a football match on television (or even the repeat of an old match) will not excite my interest all over again. I am Browne’s unsatisfactory Christian—“too sensible of this life, or hopeless of the life to come”—except that I am not a Christian.

Chapter 18

Perhaps the important divide is less between the religious and the irreligious as between those who fear death and those who don’t. We fall thereby into four categories, and it’s clear which two regard themselves as superior: those who do not fear death because they have faith, and those who do not fear death despite having no faith. These groups take the moral high ground. In third place come those who, despite having faith, cannot rid themselves of the old, visceral, rational fear. And then, out of the medals, below the salt, up shit creek, come those of us who fear death and have no faith.

I’m sure my father feared death, and fairly certain my mother didn’t: she feared incapacity and dependence more. And if my father was a death-fearing agnostic and my mother a fearless atheist, this difference has been replicated in their two sons. My brother and I are now both over sixty, and I have only just asked him—a few pages ago—what he thinks of death. When he replied, “I am quite content with the way things are,” did he mean that he is quite content with his own personal extinction? And has his immersion in philosophy reconciled him to the brevity of life, and its inevitable ending for him within, say, the next thirty years?