Nothing to Be Frightened Of (33 page)

Being wrong: my brother in error. After our mother’s death, he took our parents’ ashes to the Atlantic coast of France, where they had often holidayed. He and his wife scattered them on the dunes with the help of J., our parents’ closest French friend. They read “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun” from
Cymbeline
(“Golden lads and girls all must / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust”) and Jacques Prévert’s poem “
Les Escargots qui vont à l’enterrement
”; my brother pronounced himself “strangely moved” by the event. Later, over dinner, conversation turned to our parents’ annual visits to that part of France. “I remember being staggered,” my brother told me, “when J. described how every night Father had kept them up to the early hours with his anecdotes and lively conversation. I can’t remember him ever speaking after they moved to that frightful bungalow, and I had imagined that he had forgotten how to be amusing. But evidently I was quite mistaken.” The best explanation I can offer is that our father’s French, being superior to our mother’s, enabled him for those few weeks of the year to gain linguistic and social primacy; either that, or our mother, when abroad, might deliberately have become a more conventionally listening wife (however unlikely that sounds).

Being wrong: an error of my own in return. I was breastfed, my brother bottle-fed: from this I once deduced the bifurcation of our natures. But one of my last visits to my mother produced an uncharacteristic moment of near-intimacy. There had been a report in the newspapers concluding that breastfed children were more intelligent than bottle-fed ones. “I read that as well,” said Ma, “and I laughed. Nothing wrong with
my two
, I thought.” And then—under cross-examination—she confirmed that I had no more been breastfed than my brother. I didn’t ask her reason: whether a determination to give us an equal start in life, or a squeamishness at a potentially messy business (“Mucky pup!”). Except that it was still not exactly the same start, for she mentioned that we had been fed on different formulae. She even told me the names on the bottles, which I promptly forgot. A theory of temperament based on different brands of commercial baby-milk? That would be pretty tendentious, even I would admit. And nowadays I don’t consider my brother’s bringing of tea to our mother’s sickbed any less warm-hearted than my own self-indulgent (and perhaps lazy) blanket-snuggling.

And here is a more complicated error, if equally long-term. P., the French
assistant
who told tales of Mr. Beezy-Weezy, never came back to England; but his year with us was memorialized by the two small, unframed landscapes he gave my parents. They had a rather dark, Dutch feel to them: one showed a tumbledown bridge across a river, with foliage cascading from the parapet; the other, a windmill against a rowdy sky with three white-headdressed women picnicking in the foreground. You could tell they were artistically done because of the thick brushstrokes used in river, sky, and meadow. During my childhood and adolescence, these two paintings hung in the sitting room; later, at the “frightful bungalow,” they presided over the dining table. I must have glanced at them regularly for fifty years and more, without ever asking myself, or my parents, where exactly P. had set up his box of oils. France—his native Corsica, perhaps—Holland, England?

When I was house-clearing after my mother’s death, I found in a drawer two postcards showing exactly the same two views. My first instinct was to assume that they had been specially printed for P. to advertise his work: he always had a beretful of theoretically money-making schemes. Then I turned them over and realized that they were commercially produced art cards of typically Breton scenes: “
Vieux Moulin à Cléden
” and “
Le Pont fleuri.
” What I had all my life imagined to be competent originality was merely competent copying. And then there was a further twist. The cards were signed “Yvon” in the bottom right-hand corner, as if by the artist. But “Yvon” turned out to be the name of the card company. So the pictures had been produced in the first place solely in order to be turned into postcards—whereupon P. had turned them back into the “original” paintings they had never been. A French theorist would have been delighted by all this. I hastened to tell my brother of our fifty-year error, expecing him to be equally amused. He wasn’t at all: for the simple reason that he had a clear memory of P. painting the pictures, “and of thinking how much cleverer it was to copy than to make something up out of your own head.”

Such factual corrections are easily made, and may even feel mentally refreshing. It will be harder to face error about perceptions and judgements you have come to look upon as your own achievements. Take death. For most of my sentient life I’ve known the vivid dread, and also felt fully able—despite what Freud maintained—to imagine my own eternal nonexistence. But what if I am quite wrong? Freud’s contention, after all, was that our unconscious mind remains doggedly convinced of our immortality—a thesis irrefutable by its very nature. So perhaps what I think of as pit-gazing is only the illusion of truth-examination because deep down I do not—cannot—believe in the pit; and this illusion may even continue until the very end if Koestler is right about our consciousness splitting when we are
in extremis.

And there’s another way of being wrong: what if the dread we feel in advance—which seems to us so absolute—turns out to be as nothing compared to the real thing? What if our void-imaginings are but the palest rehearsal for what we experience—as Goethe found out—in the final hours? And what, further, if the approach of death overwhelms all known language, so that we cannot even report the truth? A sense of having been wrong all the time: well, Flaubert did say that contradiction is the thing that keeps sanity in place.

And beyond death, God. If there were a games-playing God, He would surely get especial ludic pleasure from disappointing those philosophers who had convinced themselves and others of His nonexistence. A. J. Ayer assures Somerset Maugham that there is nothing, and nothingness, after death: whereupon they both find themselves players in God’s little end-of-the-pier entertainment called Watch the Fury of the Resurrected Atheist. That’s a neat would-you-rather for the God-denying philosopher: would you rather there was nothing after death, and you were proved right, or that there was a wonderful surprise, and your professional reputation was destroyed?

“Atheism is aristocratic,” Robespierre declared. The great twentieth-century British embodiment of this was Bertrand Russell—helped, no doubt, by the fact that he
was
aristocratic. In old age, with his unruly white hair, Russell looked, and was treated, like a wise man halfway to godhead: a one-man
Any Questions?
panel in himself. His disbelief never wavered, and friendly provocateurs took to asking him how he would react if, after a lifetime of propagandizing atheism, he turned out to be wrong. What if the pearly gates were neither a metaphor nor a fantasy, and he found himself faced by a deity he had always denied? “Well,” Russell used to reply, “I would go up to Him, and I would say, ‘You didn’t give us enough evidence.’”

Chapter 62

Psychologists tell us we exaggerate the stability of our past beliefs. Perhaps this is a way of asserting our shaky selfhood; also, of congratulating ourselves, as on a greater achievement, when we rethink those beliefs—just as we take pride in our acquisition of wisdom after those extra dendrites start sprouting. But apart from the constant, if unmonitored, flux of our self, or our selfness, there are times when the whole world, which we like to imagine so solid around us, suddenly lurches: times when “getting it wrong” hardly covers the cosmic shift. The moment of that first, personal
réveil mortel
; the moment—not necessarily contemporaneous—when we grasp that everyone else will die too; the realization that human life itself will end, as the sun boils away the oceans; and then, beyond that, planet death. All this we take on board, trying to keep our balance as we do.

But there is something else, even more vertiginous, to consider. We are, as a species, inclined to historical solipsism. The past is what has led to us; the future is what is being created by us. We claim ownership, triumphantly, of the best of times, and also, self-pityingly, of the worst of times. We tend to confuse our scientific and technological progress with moral and social progress. And we forget a little too easily that evolution is not just a process which has brought the race to its current admirable condition, but one which logically implies evolution away from us.

Yet how far, on a practical basis, do we look back, and how far ahead? I think I can see with reasonable clarity and breadth back to about the middle of the nineteenth century (in my own Western European culture, of course). Beyond that there are individual geniuses, moral and artistic exemplars, key ideas, intellectual movements, and pieces of historical action, but only here and there, rarely part of a continuum; and my reverse-looking runs out at, say, those Cycladic figurines of 3,000–2,000 bc. My forward looking certainly goes no further than the same basic hundred and fifty years or so; it is cautious, unfocused, and low in its expectations of posterity.

Chekhov was the great understander, and dramatizer, of our two-directional gaze. He specialized in defeated idealists who once dreamed of a better life, but are now becalmed in the present and fearful of the future. As a Chekhov play nears its end, a character will timidly express the hope that posterity may enjoy a less painful life and look back with tenderness on such forlorn predecessors. Knowing chuckles and superior sighs can sometimes be heard from the posterity that makes up the audience: the soft sound of forgiveness cut with an ironic recognition of what has actually happened in the intervening century—Stalinism, mass murder, gulags, brutal industrialization, the felling and poisoning of all those forests and lakes so mournfully invoked by Dr. Astrov and his soulmates, and the handing-over of music to the likes of Pavel Apostolov.

But as we look back at the tunnel-vision dupes of yesteryear, we tend to forget about our successors looking back at us, and judging our self-absorption for what it is worth—worth to them, not to us. What understanding, what tenderness, what forgiveness for us? What about
our
posterity? If we consider the question at all, our timescale is likely to be Chekhovian: a generation or two, perhaps a century. And those we imagine judging us will not, we presume, be so very different from us, because from now on the planet’s future is going to be about fine-tuning the human animal: improving our moral and social senses, tamping down our aggressive habits, defeating poverty and disease, outwitting climate change, extending the human lifespan, and so on.

Yet from an evolutionary viewpoint, these are mere politicians’ dreams, incredibly short-term. Not long ago, scientists in various disciplines were asked to describe the single idea they wished were more generally understood. I have forgotten all the others, so reorienting was the impact of a statement by Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge:

I’d like to widen people ’s awareness of the tremendous timespan lying ahead—for our planet, and for life itself. Most educated people are aware that we’re the outcome of nearly 4bn years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6bn years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

Of course! WRONG—VERY WRONG—ALL THE TIME. And how amateurish not to have considered something so bluntly, intimidatingly consequential. “We” shall not die out in six billion years. Something far beyond us—or at any rate, far different from us—will die out. For a start, we might have disappeared in another of the planet’s great extinctions. The Permian Extinction took out ninety-nine per cent of all animals on earth, the Cretaceous two-thirds of all species, including the dinosaurs, making it possible for mammals to become the dominant land vertebrates. Perhaps a third Extinction will take us out in our turn and leave the world to . . . what? Beetles? The geneticist J.B.S. Haldane used to joke that if there were a God, He must have “an inordinate fondness for beetles,” given that He had created 350,000 species of them.

But even without a new Extinction, evolution will not unfold in the way we—sentimentally, solipsistically—hope. The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable. Forget the best and the brightest, forget evolution being some grand, impersonal, socially acceptable version of eugenics. It will take us where it wishes—or rather, not take “us,” since we shall soon prove ill-equipped for wherever it’s heading; it will discard us as crude, insufficiently adaptable prototypes, and continue blindly towards new life forms which will make “us”—and Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein—seem as distant as mere bacteria and amoebae. So much
a fortiori
for Gautier and art defeating death; so much for that pathetic murmur of
I was here too.
There is no “too,” as there will be nothing to which or to whom we can recognizably appeal, nothing that in turn will recognize us. Perhaps those future life forms will have retained and adapted intelligence, and will view us as primitive organisms of curious habit and faint historico-biological interest. Or perhaps they will be life forms of small intelligence but great physical adaptability. Imagine them munching away on the surface of the earth, while all the evidence of
homo sapiens
’s brief existence slumbers in the fossil record below.