Nothing to Be Frightened Of (31 page)

“The want of a future dead person.” My brother points out wryly that “Alas, all our wants are wants of future dead people.” But anyway, for what it’s worth, yes, burial. Visit me and scrape the lichen from my name with the key of your rental car; then propose me for secular resurrection from a chunk of my DNA, though not—I hope you don’t mind my insisting on this point—before the technical process really has been perfected. And then we shall see if my consciousness is the same as the first time round, whether I remember anything of this previous life (recognize this sentence as my own), and whether I sit down at the nearest typewriter and with laborious excitement produce the same books all over again—in which case there will, apart from anything else, be some interesting copyright problems.

No, that’s all a bit desperate. I know they’ve dug butcher’s cuts of woolly mammoth out of the permafrost and are planning to regrow one of those tusky trundlers in a laboratory. But pleading novelists would come pretty low down any list, I imagine (perhaps in the future, writers will seek to make resuscitation a term of contract, like having their books printed on acid-free paper). Better to agree with the French state’s either/or: either you’re alive, or you’re dead, and nothing in between. Better to make it a definite adieu than a chance-in-a-billion au revoir, and to say, with Daudet, “Farewell wife . . . family, the things of the heart.” And then “Farewell me, cherished me, now so hazy, so indistinct.” That’s wiser, isn’t it?

Chapter 57

Wisdom consists partly in not pretending any more, in discarding artifice. Rossini wrote his
Petite Messe solennelle
after coming out of a thirty-eight-year retirement. He called his late works “the sins of my old age” and the Mass “the last of these sins.” At the end of the manuscript, he wrote a dedication in French: “Dear God, well, here it is, finished at last, my Little Solemn Mass. Have I really written sacred music, or is it just more of my usual damn stuff? I was born for opera buffa, as You well know. Not much skill there, just a bit of feeling, that’s the long and the short of it. So, Glory be to God, and please grant me Paradise. G. Rossini—Passy, 1863.”

This inscription is childlike in its hopefulness. And there is something infinitely touching when an artist, in old age, takes on simplicity. The artist is saying: display and bravura are tricks for the young, and yes, showing off is part of ambition; but now that we are old, let us have the confidence to speak simply. For the religious, this might mean becoming as a child again in order to enter heaven; for the artist, it means becoming wise enough, and calm enough, not to hide. Do you need all those extravagances in the score, all those marks on the canvas, all those exuberant adjectives? This is not just humility in the face of eternity; it is also that it takes a lifetime to see, and say, simple things.

“Wise enough.” Sometimes my coevals say, in a puzzled fashion, “The funny thing is, I don’t feel any older.” I certainly do, and if I am in any doubt, there is a stark calculation available when passing, say, a twelve-year-old lolling outside the school gates with a precocious cigarette in hand. I reflect that I, as a sixty-year-old in 2006, am closer in age to the oldest surviving soldier of the First World War than I am to that kid. Do I feel wiser? Yes, a little; certainly, less foolish (and perhaps wise enough to lament the loss of some folly). Wise enough to be simple? Not quite yet, O Lord.

Wisdom is the virtuous reward for those who patiently examine the workings of the human heart and the human brain, who process experience and thus acquire an understanding of life: isn’t it? Well, Sherwin Nuland, wise thanatologist, has something to say on the matter. Would you like the good news first, or the bad? A sound tactic always to choose the good—you might die before you get to hear the bad. The good news is that we do indeed sometimes become wiser as we grow older. And here’s the (longer) bad news. We know all too well that our brains wear out. However frantically their component parts renew themselves, the cells of the brain (like the muscles of the heart) have a limited shelf life. For every decade of life after the age of fifty, the brain loses two per cent of its weight; it also takes on a creamy-yellow tinge—“even senescence is colour-coded.” The motor area of our frontal cortex will lose twenty to fifty per cent of its neurons, the visual area fifty per cent, and the physical sensory part about the same. No,
that
’s not the bad part. The bad part comes enclosed in a comparatively good part—the news that the higher intellectual functions of the brain are much less affected by this widespread cellular morbidity. Indeed, “certain cortical neurons” seem to become more abundant after we reach maturity, and there is even evidence that the filamentous branchings—the dendrites—of many neurons continue to grow in old people who don’t suffer from Alzheimer’s (if you
do
have Alzheimer’s, forget it). From this, “Neurophysiologists may actually have discovered the source of what wisdom we like to think we can accumulate with advancing age.” Weigh that “like to think we can accumulate” and grieve. A friend who occasionally seeks my ear nicknames me “The Advice Centre”—a tag which, even allowing for irony, gives me absurd pleasure. But it turns out that I’ve just got this bushy growth of filamentous branchings—nothing I can do about it.

Wisdom, philosophy, serenity: how will they stack up against mortal terror, eleven on a scale of one to ten? As an example, I give you Goethe. One of the wisest men of his age, who lived into his eighties with his faculties intact, his health excellent and his fame universal. He had always been impressively sceptical about the notion of survival after death. He thought a concern for immortality the preoccupation of idle minds, and those who believed in it far too self-congratulatory. His amused and practical position was that if, after this life, he were to discover that there was another one, he would of course be pleased; but he ardently hoped he wouldn’t run into all those bores who had spent their terrestrial time proclaiming their belief in immortality. To hear them crowing “We were right! We were right!” would be even more intolerable in the next life than it had been in this.

What could appear saner and wiser than this? And so Goethe continued working deep into old age, completing the second part of
Faust
in the summer of 1831. Nine months later, he fell ill, and took to his bed. He had one final day of extreme pain, though even after losing the power of speech he continued to trace letters on the rug over his knees (still taking his usual care over punctuation—a wonderful example of dying in character). Friends loyally claimed that he had died nobly, even Christianly. The truth, as revealed by his doctor’s diary, was that Goethe was “in the grip of a terrible fear and agitation.” The reason for the “horror” of that final day was evident to the doctor: Goethe, the wise Goethe, the man who had everything in perspective, could not avoid the dread that Sherwin Nuland promises us.

Chapter 58

Turgenev had that little hand gesture, which made the unbearable subject vanish into a Slav mist. Nowadays, the gesture and the mist are available pharmaceutically When my mother had her initial stroke, the doctors, as a matter of medical routine—and without mentioning it to her family—whacked in the antidepressants. So though she was angry, and deeply frustrated, and at times “completely bonkers,” she was probably not depressed. My father, preceding her down this route, often struck me as depressed, and would sit with his head in his hands. I took this for a natural and logical response, given a) what had happened, b) his temperament, and c) that he was married to my mother. Perhaps medicine will develop a procedure allowing us to master that part of the brain which considers its own death. As with the patient-operated morphine drip, we might, at a thumb-click, be able to control our own death-mood and death-feelings. Denial
click
Anger
click click
Bargaining—ah, that’s better. And perhaps we shall be able to click ourselves beyond mere Acceptance (“Oh, here I am on my deathbed—this is where I am”) to Approval: to finding the whole business reasonable, natural, even desirable. We shall feel comforted by the Law of the Conservation of Energy, by the knowledge that nothing is ever lost in the universe. We shall feel gratitude for our lucky lives when so many trillions and trillions of potential people went unborn. We shall acknowledge that ripeness is all, and think of ourselves as a fruit happy to drop from the twig, a crop serene about its harvesting. We shall be proud to make room for others as others have made room for us. We shall feel convinced and consoled by that medieval image of the bird flying into the lighted hall and flying out the other side. And what, after all, could be more useful to us as dying animals? Welcome to the Euphoria Ward.

We shall probably die in hospital, you and I: a modern death, with little folklore present. In Chitry-les-Mines the peasants used to burn the straw from a dead person’s mattress, while saving the cloth. When Stravinsky died, his widow Vera made sure that all the mirrors in the room were covered; she also avoided touching his corpse, believing that the spirit lived on within it for another forty days. In many cultures, doors and windows would be opened so that the soul might escape and fly free; and you didn’t lean over, or stand in front of a dying person, for the same reason. Hospital dying has done away with such customs. In place of folklore, we have bureaucratic procedure.

At the Witney registry of Births and Deaths it said KNOCK AND WAIT on the door. As my mother and I waited, a larky couple came down the corridor past us from the direction of Marriages. The registrar was a woman in her late thirties, with two Cabbage Patch dolls pinned to the wall and a fat paperback by Maeve Binchy beside her. Spotting a reader, my mother remarked that her son was also a writer (I died a little death): “Julian Barnes, have you heard of him?” But the registrar had not; and instead we found common literary ground by discussing the television adaptation of Melvyn Bragg’s
A Time to Dance.
The questions and the silent form-filling took place. Then, at the very end, the registrar won my mother’s approval without even knowing that she was doing so. Ma leaned forward to sign her husband’s death certificate, and the official exclaimed, “Oh,
don’t
you keep your nails in perfect condition!” As she always had. Her nails: the reason she hoped to go deaf rather than blind.

Five years later, registering my mother’s death, I was dealt with by a different woman, one with a metronomic delivery and no skill—or luck—in human contact. All the details had been given, the signatures provided, the duplicate copies obtained, and I was rising to leave when she suddenly uttered four soullessly otiose words in a dead voice: “That completes the registration.” She used the same mechanical tone employed by the humanoid bosses of the Football Association, when the last of the ivory balls has been drawn from the velvet bag, and they announce, “That completes the draw for the quarter-final round of the FA Cup.”

And that completes the folklore of my family. I would like a little more myself. I wouldn’t mind you standing over my deathbed—a friendly face would be welcome, even if I doubt its availability at two in the morning in an understaffed hospital. I don’t expect doors and windows to be left open after I’m dead, not least because the insurance company would decline to pay out in the event of burglary. But I wouldn’t mind that headstone. In the last year of his life, when he knew himself condemned, Jules Renard took to visiting cemeteries. One day he went to see the Goncourt Brothers in their Montmartre tomb. The younger brother had been buried there in 1870; the elder, Edmond, in 1896, after a graveside eulogy from the death-fearing Zola. Renard noted in his
Journal
how the brothers’ literary pride was such that they disdained mention of their profession. “Two names, two sets of dates, they thought that was enough.
Hé! hé!
” Renard comments, in that curious French transcription of a cackle. “That’s not anything you can rely upon.” But did such plainness denote vanity—the assumption that everyone would know who they were—or its very opposite, a proper avoidance of boastfulness? Also, perhaps, a sober awareness that, once released into history, no writer’s name is guaranteed? I wonder what it says on Renard’s tomb.