Nothing to Be Frightened Of (30 page)

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 you 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.”

I should like to grow into (though by some bureaucratic reckonings I already am) an old man mad about writing; nor would I mind being visited. I like the idea—a desire my brother might deem illegitimate, being the future want of a dead person, or the want of a future dead person—of someone reading a book of mine and seeking out my grave in response. This is literary vanity in the main; but there’s brute superstition lurking underneath. Just as it’s hard to shake entirely the lingering memory of God, and the fantasy of judgement (as long as it’s fair—i.e. deeply indulgent), and the hopeful, hopeless dream that there’s some celestial fucking point to it all, so it’s hard to hold constantly to the knowledge that death is final. The mind still seeks an escape from mortality’s box, can still be tempted by a little science fiction. And if God is no longer there to help, and cryonics is a sad old man sitting by a leaky fridge hoping that a tragedy can have a happy ending, then we must look elsewhere. In my first novel the (at times all too convincingly autobiographical) narrator considers the possibility of some kind of cloning. Naturally, he imagines it in terms of things going wrong. “Suppose they find a way, even after you are dead, of reconstituting you. What if they dig up your coffin and find you’re just a bit too putrefied . . . What if you’ve been cremated and they can’t find all the grains . . . What if the State Revivification Committee decides you’re not important enough . . .” And so on—up to and including the scenario in which you’ve been approved for a second incarnation, and are about to be brought back to life, when a clumsy nurse drops a vital test tube, and your clearing vision hazes over eternally.