Julian Barnes, "Nothing to Be Frightened of"

  – ebook

Read from August 4^th to September 1^st 2021

My Rating:  

 

Part family memoir, part essay on death, Julian Barnes’ Nothing to Be Frightened of is a touching, but also an often humorous meditation on the most faithful companion of us all.

The book eclectically gathers different attitudes towards Death (and expectations beyond it), from curiosity and indifference to terror, of his family or of artists, in what he calls a pseudo-therapeutic effort to overcome his own fear.

Looking for a magic solution, the narrator remembers that in his youth he was terrified of flying, and tried to control it a little by staging his afterdeath: he used to choose a book he considered would have impressed those finding his corpse, let’s say Bouvard et Pécuchet (in French, of course), imagining how he would be found with “a stiffened forefinger bookmarking a particularly admired passage, of which posterity would therefore take note”. He was cured by his fear when, to kill time between two flights in an airport he watched many planes taking off and landing without crashing. He asks himself whether becoming more familiarized with death would cure him of the fear of it:

The fallacy is this: at Athens airport, I was watching thousands and thousands of passengers not die. At an undertaker’s or mortuary, I would be confirming my worst suspicion: that the death rate for the human race is not a jot lower than one hundred per cent.

He thinks of Platonists, who prepared themselves to become a pure soul after death, by fasting and self-flagellation, but also of Epicureans, who did not believe there was anything after death, and finally of Cicero, who “combined the two traditions into a cheery Antique either/or: ‘After death, either we feel better or we feel nothing.’”

He also thinks of many people who were more curious than afraid of their own death: the medical historian Roy Porter who wished to be fully conscious in order not to miss anything of the experience, the Swiss physiologist Albrecht von Haller, who monitored his own pulse on his deathbed in 1777 (his last words to his brother being: “My friend, the artery ceases to beat”) and Voltaire who, just a year before, had done the same; contrastingly, he agrees with the writer and director Jonathan Miller, who had also been trained as a doctor, and who claimed to be afraid not of the nonexistence but of the deathbed sufferings: “agony, delirium, torturing hallucinations, and the lamenting family preparing for his departure”.

And of course, he thinks of God, Whose absence is a secondary theme of the book. On one hand, he considers Pascal’s wager both childish and blasphemous, with its double bet on God’s existence, and on God’s nature:

What if God is not as imagined? What, for instance, if He disapproves of gamblers, especially those whose purported belief in Him is dependent on some acorn-beneath-the-cup mentality? And who decides who wins? Not us: God might prefer the honest doubter to the sycophantic chancer.

On the other hand, he believes that to say that you have a personal idea of God is soppy, because it doesn’t matter what you think of Him but what He thinks of you:

The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque. It also doesn’t matter whether God is just or benevolent or even observant—of which there seems startlingly little proof—only that He exists.

 

Therefore, if you really want to catch the spirit of this wonderful essay, read the title again, this time stressing the appropriate word:

People say of death, “There’s nothing to be frightened of.” They say it quickly, casually. Now let’s say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. “There’s NOTHING to be frightened of.” Jules Renard: “The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is the word ‘nothing.’”

 

And one last quote to meditate upon:

“Death is not an artist”: no, and would never claim to be one. Artists are unreliable; whereas death never lets you down, remains on call seven days a week, and is happy to work three consecutive eight-hour shifts. You would buy shares in death, if they were available; you would bet on it, however poor the odds.