Waiting for the Last Bus: Reflections on Life and Death by Richard Holloway
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Be Bwave

I suppose that I’m the target demographic for this book. Having exhausted my three score and ten, I am now on bonus time. I have not been cheated of anything about life. There are family members who care for me. I have no material worries. In short, things have exceeded expectations. So Death is the obvious issue at hand.

“Fortitude is one of the most important lessons life teaches, and ageing may be our last chance to learn it... Fortitude is the ability to endure the reality of our condition without flinching,” Holloway says. But what he has in mind is not the fortitude of a Dylan Thomas:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Nor is it the fortitude of John Donne, who unlike Holloway despite his Anglican priesthood, was consoled by the Christian story of the Resurrection:

“Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so...”

Rather, for Holloway fortitude is a sort of British stoicism, a stiff upper lip in response to circumstances that are inevitable. The doomed fortitude 0f the squaddie in the British Square on the 18th century battlefield, the resigned numbness of Nelson’s quarterdeck as his officers stare into the muzzles of Spanish guns with sang froid. Death for him frames living in a way not dissimilar to some existentialist philosophers - as a way to an aesthetic appreciation. Knowing that one is soon to have no appreciation of anything is certainly a spur to feast on it while its there; but that sounds more like gluttony than fortitude.

Holloway thinks that Thomas’s rage implies resistance or bitterness or displaced anger. I don’t understand why. Rage seems to me a perfectly appropriate response to forthcoming annihilation. And I see no reason to connect it with other emotions, nor to condemn it as a waste of energy. All energy is ultimately wasted; what matters is how. However natural and inevitable it is to die, it is nevertheless outrageous, a monstrously excessive cost to pay, not for life but for consciousness. Death is an unjust impertinence despite its certainty. I don’t need to resent Death to quietly spit in its face. My body will be recycled but not my self. Why not rage? Why not spit?

Holloway’s substitute for rage or for joyful Christian expectation is a sort of wan nostalgia. In summary his logic is straightforward: ‘Just think about how much things have changed during your life; how few of your contemporaries are left; how uncomfortable life has become in so many small ways.’ In circumstances he subtly makes equivalent to going over the top into machine gun fire, why shouldn’t Sweet Sister Death be welcome as a restful end to loss, as David Jones says in his In Parenthesis?

“By one and one the line gaps, where her [Sweet Sister Death's] fancy will - howsoever they may howl for their virginity
She holds them - who impinge less space
And limply to a heap
nourish a lesser category of being"

So, prepare yourself calmly Holloway suggests: “Slip into choral evensong somewhere to experience the music and touch the longing it carries for the human soul.” A little light spiritual refreshment for the soul on the way out. Or take time to “indulge in that delicious form of reflective sadness we call melancholy.” You’ve earned a bit of depressive wallowing. And a bit of self-pity wouldn’t go amiss either. Best accept that “From the beginning, we were being driven by facts and circumstances that were never in our control.” None of it is really our fault. He even finds comfort in the Calvinist idea of predestination.

It’s difficult to disagree with any of these proposals. But, equally, it’s difficult to take any of this seriously. Age has its privileges and should be taken advantage of. But these particular shibbolethic aphorisms are... well insipid really, of the Keep the Aspidistra Flying variety. We’re getting ready for Death here, not training for a stress-free retirement. These things may promote a quiet Death but I can’t see they are likely to promote a better one.

And Holloway’s insistence on meditating on the prospective last moment before oblivion. What is this? We enter oblivion every night without a worry. Why should Death feel any different than sleep? My last conscious moment has about as much emotional significance as that final moment of the universe from entropic heat death. Holloway apparently thinks that most people fear death. I don’t. I fear pain and I fear loss of love. And Death might be just the thing to avoid both.

As for theories of an afterlife, I’d really rather read some good sci-fi by P K Dick than hear the stale tales of Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism (Judaism is generally more circumspect about the matter). Nor do I find the discussion of cryogenics - terrestrial or orbital - of pressing interest. The only conclusion I can draw from the availability of such services is that the medieval practice of indulgences has found a new market. The virtue of Hope often, it seems, promotes the vice of Gullibility.

In summary I have to say that although I may be the right demographic, I am not the right personality profile for this book. Despite Holloway’s increasing distance over the years from Christian doctrine, he remains so very Church of England. Don’t misunderstand me. I think the Church of England has discovered a wonderful way to live with a religion, namely by making all doctrine more or less optional. But this means that it doesn’t have very much important to say about some things. Death is one of these. This is not a bad thing. But perhaps when one has little say of import about a subject one should refrain from saying anything at all.

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