Julian Barnes on Life and Death
In Nothing to Be Frightened Of (published in 2008), Julian Barnes grapples with death: the death of his parents and his own death, sure to come. In death no one is alone, we are all going to get there, sooner or later, and Barnes is erudite and quietly funny in getting us there well-prepared. Using conversational and circular prose, he brings us back again and again to the big questions: Is there an afterlife or not? Is it better to be lucid in your last moments or completely out of it? What is worse, the act of dying or the permanent state of death? Is there such a thing as a “good” death? What do we get from those who went before and what do we owe to those who come after? And can we accept that all of us will enter obscurity (the last visitor to the grave, the last reader of the prose)? Death is obscurity, either within a generation or within millennia, what does it matter? Obscurity is what beckons. That is the “nothing” to be frightened of.
Despite the fact that we are moving towards death from the moment we are born, Barnes recognizes the beauty of that in-between period, life. He writes,
“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.”
Barnes shares generously with us his thoughts on the subject of death, including his memories of his parents and grandparents, and also conversations with brother and friends, and the words of authors and musicians, including his favorite death-writer Jules Renard, his favorite (and deservedly so) death poet Phillip Larkin, as well as Zola, Montaigne, Shostakovich, Stendhal, and Rachmaninoff.
Barnes tells a very funny, and possibly instructive, story about Rachmaninoff. The great composer had a deep and obsessive fear of death, talking about it often with anyone who would listen. On a visit once to acquaintances, he began to talk about his fear and at the same time began eating from a nearby plate of salted pistachios. After munching on them for awhile he suddenly broke off speaking and began to laugh: “The pistachio nuts have made my fear go away. Do you know where to?” he asked. They did not know but gave him a full bag of pistachio nuts for his trip back to Moscow. Lesson: eat more pistachios, especially before bed if you are, like me, prone to thinking about death and worrying its consequences late into the darkest night. Although I am not scared of dying, I am fearful of what my death will bring to those who care and will be upset by it, and I worry about how to make it easier for everyone. As Larkin wrote in his poem “Aubade” and as quoted by Barnes, “Courage means not scaring others.” But how to leave them without pain? I wish Barnes would have reflected on that question, how to ease the sorrows of those left alive, thinking and feeling and remembering those who have died.
The one point that Barnes makes again and again and yet I found it very weakly argued was his insistence that not one of us truly believe that we will die. I think many of us do know we will die, enter nothingness, and be no more. Although it may not please us, we accept mortality as unassailable. I just hope that it happens later and not sooner.
Barnes spends quite a bit of time debating the promises of various religions and the possibility of life everlasting through faith. Once a “happy atheist”, Barnes is now a troubled agnostic: he is not buying the religious promise of a hereafter but wonders “what if”? He tells the story of an atheist getting to the gates of heaven and being pretty pissed off about it all. Just when you think it’s all over, it’s not.
Using an oft-used maxim of his own when referring to the novel, “[the novel] tells beautiful shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths”, Barnes says that “religions were the first great inventions of fiction writers. A convincing representation and a plausible explanation of the world for understandably confused minds. A beautiful, shapely story containing hard, exact lies.” Well put, I’d say.
Some great death bed lines, quoted by Barnes: Rabelais said, “I’m going to seek a Great Perhaps” countered by Larkin’s “I am going to the Inevitable.” I’ve always liked the supposedly final words of Oscar Wilde, “Either this wallpaper goes or I do.”
