Nothing to Be Frightened of by Julian Barnes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Le Réveil Mortel: Sensing the End

I have always found the leap from metaphysical mystery to Christian religious belief by apologists like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton to be a rhetorical sleight of hand. It is illogical and vaguely insulting. The recognition that human language, perception, and thought don’t quite get to reality is as old as philosophy. But the idea that this inadequacy or defect or disability offers a rationale for the truth, or even the relevance, of Christian doctrine appears to me ludicrous. On the contrary, this congenital human uncertainty would seem to undermine anything like Christian or any other purported faith.

So Barnes’s by now famous opening line is one I can identify with: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.” What a shame that the profound humility implied by human fallibility should be transformed into an arrogance which displaces a sense of emotional loss with the need for power. Isn’t that what religious faith really is? A euphemism, a justification for the acquisition and exercise of power?

Christian faith in particular claims the ultimate power - over death. Christianity not only invented this power (using the tools provided by Platonic philosophy to propagate the teaching of Paul of Tarsus), it also claimed the right to confer it. In so doing the Church deflected attention from death to its aftermath, heaven and hell. Death itself is either an irrelevance or a blessing depending on one’s sectarian affiliation. But in any case the extinction of life isn’t taken all that seriously as a metaphysical event except as a momentary transition from one state to another.

Barnes’s religious sentiment has never been infected by this metaphysical misdirection: “I had no faith to lose, only a resistance, which felt more heroic than it was, to the mild regime of God-referring that an English education entailed.” God for Barnes is an aesthetic, perhaps an aesthetic best described as Incompleteness, a recognition that there is always more than we know, that we can know, about the world and about ourselves.

This incompleteness is symbolized most articulately by death, or perhaps more precisely what Barnes calls “le réveil mortel,” the sense of mortality, which is the real mystery of human life. Death therefore is not something to be overcome - by faith or anything else - but something to be approached with an aesthetic reverence. Is it not our ultimate personal work of art?

Of course death implies a hole, a gap, a hiatus, a vacuum in existence. But the shape of that hole can be an object of artistic, or at least constructive, effort. Not in terms of legacies, or estates, or wills which are yet more attempts to negate death, but through the character of one’s dying as the meaning of the life that is disappearing.

“Mortality often gatecrashes my consciousness,” says Barnes. Not an afterlife of bliss or agony, but this life in its ending. According to Barnes, “Rachmaninov only surprised his friends when he didn’t want to talk about death.” This implies to me not fear of death but respectful and not unhealthy interest. It’s the way we build our own death piece by piece, through writing a book about it or composing a magnificent Dies Irae as an anticipatory expression of it.

Shostakovich (there is definitely an affinity between Russian, but not Soviet, aesthetics and death) is even more explicit: “We should think more about it and accustom ourselves to the thought of death. We can’t allow the fear of death to creep up on us unexpectedly. We have to make the fear familiar, and one way is to write about it. I don’t think writing and thinking about death is characteristic only of old men. I think that if people began thinking about death sooner, they’d make fewer foolish mistakes.”

None of this is really news except that it’s been restricted to a sort of cultural samizdat. Cicero knew it; Socrates knew it; Montaigne knew it. Christianity tried to erase the collective consciousness of death and nearly did for a time in the Middle Ages. Faith got us talking about pensions as well as heaven and hell rather than dying.

My interpretation of Barnes’s meditative memoir is unavoidably shaped by my own experience. But I think we share a common aversion to Christianity along with a profound appreciation for its poetry, visual and aural as well as linguistic. It is this poetry which points constantly to the beyond in the idea of death without the doctrinal detritus of power-seeking. And it is this poetry from which the character of one’s death might be constructed.

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