Nothing to Be Frightened Of (7 page)

I also have the family documentation in the shallow drawer to back me up. Here, for instance, are the results of my O level exams, taken when I was fifteen. Memory would certainly not have told me that my best marks were for mathematics, and my worst, embarrassingly, for English: 77 out of 100 for the language paper, and a humiliating 25 out of 50 for the English essay.

My second-worst marks were, unsurprisingly, for General Science. The biology section of that exam included such tasks as drawing the transverse section of a tomato, and describing the process of fertilization as enjoyed by stamens and pistils. That was about as far as we got at home, too: parental
pudeur
redoubled the silence of the syllabus. As a result, I grew up with little knowledge of how the body worked; my grasp of sexual matters had all the vivid imbalance of a sisterless autodidact at a boys-only school; and though the calibrated academic progress I made through school and university was thanks to my brain, I hadn’t the slightest idea how this organ worked. I emerged into adult-hood with the unthinking assumption that you no more needed to understand human biology in order to live than you did car mechanics in order to drive. There were always hospitals and garages for when things went wrong.

I remember being surprised to learn that the cells of my body would not last a lifetime, but would replace themselves at intervals (still, you could rebuild a car from spare parts, couldn’t you?). I wasn’t sure how often these makeovers occurred, but the awareness of cellular renewal mainly authorized jokes along the lines of “She was no longer the woman he had fallen in love with.” I hardly thought it a matter for panic: after all, my parents and grandparents must have gone through one if not two such refreshings, and they seemed to have suffered no seismic fracture; indeed, they remained all too unswervingly themselves. I don’t remember considering that the brain was part of the body, and therefore the same principles must apply up there as well. I might have been a little more inclined to panic had I discovered that the basic molecular structure of the brain, far from thoughtfully renewing itself as and when the need arises, is in fact incredibly unstable; that
fats and proteins are falling apart almost as soon as they are made
; that every molecule around a synapse is replaced by the hour, and some molecules by the minute. Indeed, that
the brain you had even last year will have been rebuilt many times over by now.

Memory in childhood—at least, as I remember it—is rarely a problem. Not just because of the briefer time span between the event and its evocation, but because of the nature of memories then: they appear to the young brain as exact simulacra, rather than processed and coloured-in versions, of what has happened. Adulthood brings approximation, fluidity, and doubt; and we keep the doubt at bay by retelling that familiar story, with pauses and periods of a calculated effect, pretending that the solidity of narrative is a proof of truth. But the child or adolescent rarely doubts the veracity and precision of the bright, lucid chunks of the past it possesses and celebrates. So at that age it seems logical to think of our memories as stored in some left-luggage office, available for retrieval when we produce the necessary ticket; or (if that seems an antique comparison, suggesting steam trains and ladies-only compartments), as goods left in one of those self-storage units now a feature of arterial roads. We know to expect the seeming paradox of old age, when we shall start to recall lost segments of our early years, which then become more vivid than our middle ones. But this only seems to confirm that it’s all really up there, in some orderly cerebral storage unit, whether we can access it or not.

My brother doesn’t remember that more than half a century ago he came second in a wheelbarrow race with Dion Shirer, and is therefore unable to confirm which of them was the barrow and which the trundler. Nor does he remember the unacceptable ham sandwiches on the journey to Switzerland. Instead he remembers matters he failed to mention on his postcard: that it was the first time he saw an artichoke, and the first time he was “sexually approached by another chap.” He also admits that over the years he has transposed the whole action to France: a confusion, perhaps, between the lesser-known Champéry in Switzerland (source of cowbells) and the more familiar Chambéry in France (source of the aperitif ). We talk about our memories, but should perhaps talk more about our forgettings, even if that is a more difficult—or logically impossible—feat.

Perhaps I should warn you (especially if you are a philosopher, theologian, or biologist) that some of this book will strike you as amateur, do-it-yourself stuff. But then we are all amateurs in and of our own lives. When we veer into other people’s professionalisms, we hope that the graph of our approximate understanding roughly shadows the graph of their knowledge; but we cannot count on it. I should also warn you that there are going to be a lot of writers in this book. Most of them dead, and quite a few of them French. One is Jules Renard, who said: “It is when faced with death that we turn most bookish.” There will also be some composers. One of them is Stravinsky, who said: “Music is the best way we have of digesting time.” Such artists—such dead artists—are my daily companions, but also my ancestors. They are my true bloodline (I expect my brother feels the same about Plato and Aristotle). The descent may not be direct, or provable—wrong side of the blanket, and all that—but I claim it nonetheless.

My brother forgets the ham sandwich, remembers the artichoke and the sexual approach, and has suppressed Switzerland. Can you feel a theory coming on? Perhaps the thistly rebarbativeness of the artichoke attached itself to the memory of the sexual approach. In which case, the connection might have put him off artichokes (and Switzerland) thereafter. Except that my brother eats artichokes and worked in Geneva for several years. Aha—so perhaps he welcomed the approach? Idle, interesting questions, answered at the touch of an e-mail. “As far as I recall, I neither welcomed it nor found it repugnant—merely bizarre. After that on the Metropolitan [line] I used to adopt the geometry homework strategy.”

He certainly sounds more sanguine and practical than I was, when, in the crush of the morning Tube, some brute in a suit jammed his thigh between my legs as if there really was nowhere else to put it. Or when Edwards (as he was not called), an older boy with a pustular complexion, attempted what was more an assault than a seduction in a Southern Region compartment on the way back from rugby. I found it unwelcome and, if not repugnant, certainly alarming, and have always been able to remember the exact words I used when rebuffing his attention. “Don’t get sexy, Edwards,” I said (though it was not Edwards). The words worked, but I remembered them not so much for their effectiveness as because even so they felt not quite right. What he had done—a quick finger-slash at my trousered balls—was not remotely what I considered sexy (which involved breasts, for a start), and I felt my answer had suggested something not really the case.

Chapter 11

At Oxford, I read Montaigne for the first time. He is where our modern thinking about death begins; he is the link between the wise exemplars of the Ancient World and our attempt to find a modern, grown-up, non-religious acceptance of our inevitable end.
Philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir.
To be a philosopher is to learn how to die. Montaigne is quoting Cicero, who is in turn referring to Socrates. His learned and famous pages on death are stoical, bookish, anecdotal, epigrammatic, and consoling (in purpose, anyway); they are also urgent. As my mother pointed out, people didn’t live half so long in the old days. Forty was doing very well, given pestilence and war, with the doctor as likely to kill as cure. To die from “a draining away of one’s strength caused by extreme old age” was in Montaigne’s day a “rare, singular and extraordinary death.” Nowadays we assume it as our right.

Philippe Ariès observed that when death really began to be feared, it ceased to be talked about. Increased longevity has compounded this: since the matter seems less immediately pressing, it has become morbidly bad manners to raise it. The way we strenuously put off thinking about death reminds me of a long-running advertisement for Pearl Insurance which my brother and I liked to quote to one another. Pensions, like false teeth and chiropodists, were something so far distant as to be largely comical. This was somehow confirmed by the naive line drawings of a man with an increasingly anxious face. At age twenty-five, the face is cheerily complacent: “They tell me the job is not pension-able.” By thirty-five, a little doubt has begun to set in: “Unfortunately, my work does not bear a pension.” And so on—with the word “pension” set each time amid an admonitory oblong of grey—until age sixty-five: “Without a pension I really don’t know what I shall do.” Yes, Montaigne would say, you certainly should have started thinking about death a little earlier.

In his day, the question was constantly in front of you—unless you took the remedy of the common people who, according to Montaigne, pretended that it did not exist. But philosophers, and the mentally curious, looked to history, and to the Ancients, in search of how best to die. Nowadays, our ambitions have grown more puny. “Courage,” Larkin wrote in “Aubade,” his great death-poem, “means not scaring others.” Not back then it didn’t. It meant a great deal more: showing others how to die honourably, wisely, and with constancy.

One of Montaigne’s key instances is the story of Pomponius Atticus, a correspondent of Cicero’s. When Atticus fell ill, and medical attempts to prolong his existence merely prolonged his pain, he decided that the best solution was to starve himself to death. No need to petition a court in those days, citing the terminal deterioration in your “quality of life”: Atticus, being a Free Ancient, merely informed his friends and family of his intention, then refused food and waited for the end. In this, he was much confounded. Miraculously, abstinence turned out to be the best cure for his (unnamed) condition; and soon, the sick man was undeniably on the mend. There was much rejoicing and feasting; perhaps the doctors even withdrew their bills. But Atticus interrupted the merriment. Since we all must die one day, he announced, and since I have already made such fine strides in that direction, I have no desire to turn around now, only to start again another time. And so, to the admiring dismay of those around him, Atticus continued to refuse food and went to his exemplary death.

Montaigne believed that, since we cannot defeat death, the best form of counterattack is to have it constantly in mind: to think of death whenever your horse stumbles or a tile falls from a roof. You should have the taste of death in your mouth and its name on your tongue. To anticipate death in this way is to release yourself from its servitude: further, if you teach someone how to die, then you teach them how to live. Such constant death-awareness does not make Montaigne melancholy; rather, it renders him prone to fanciful dreaming, to reverie. He hopes that death, his companion, his familiar, will make its final house-call when he is in the middle of doing something ordinary—like planting his cabbages.

Montaigne tells the instructive story of a Roman Caesar approached by an ancient and decrepit soldier. The man had once served under him, and is now seeking permission to rid himself of his burdensome life. Caesar looks the fellow up and down, then asks, with the rough wit generalship seems to inspire, “What makes you think the thing you have at the moment is life?” For Montaigne, the death of youth, which often takes place unnoticed, is the harder death; what we habitually refer to as “death” is no more than the death of old age (forty or so in his time, seventy and more in ours). The leap from the attenuated survival of senescence into nonexistence is much easier than the sly transition from heedless youth to crabbed and regretful age.

But Montaigne is a compendious writer, and if this argument fails to convince, he has many others. For instance: if you have lived well, used life to the full, then you will be happy to let it go; whereas if you have misused life and found it miserable, then you will not regret its passing. (A proposition which seems to me entirely reversible: those in the first category might want their happy lives to continue indefinitely, those in the second might hope for a change of luck.) Or: if you’ve truly lived for a single day, in the fullest sense, then you’ve seen everything. (No!) Well then, if you’ve lived like that for a whole year, you’ve seen everything. (Still no.) Anyway, you should make room on earth for others, just as others have made room for you. (Yes, but I didn’t ask them to.) And why complain of being taken, when all are taken? Think of how many others will die on the same day as you. (True, and some of them will be as pissed off as I am about it.) Further, and finally, what exactly are you asking for when you complain against death? Do you want an immortality spent on this earth, given the terms and conditions currently applicable? (I see the argument, but how about a bit of immortality? Half? OK, I’ll settle for a quarter.)

Chapter 12