To this slightly baffling challenge, the only possible rejoinder is that, as experts of the Now, we must continue to live in the present. That, after all, is the one dimension of the space-time continuum with which we have a lifetime of experience. My thoughts spin back to my schoolroom memories of reading Keats, and his reflections on mortality:
. . . then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
‘Nothingness’ might turn out to be a realistic synonym for posterity. And yet, while the cerebral cortex is still firing, our vivid consciousness will continue to experience, and savour, ‘the nowness of everything’, Dennis Potter’s inspiring phrase. But in what, during the days and weeks before death, would that ‘nowness’ consist? What does ‘nowness’ mean to me, who am conducting this investigation?
In the course of this year, ever since Prospero’s words first popped into my head, Shakespeare’s valedictory lines in The Tempest have become an ear-worm. Prospero’s return to ‘Milan’ precedes his ‘grave’ – but where do I locate my own Milan, amid the turbulence of late middle age? Whenever I’ve described the title and subject of this book to friends and colleagues, I’ve elicited for myself a range of inward images for ‘my Milan’: a sea coast, a stretch of wild, open moorland, or a quiet patch of English countryside. My fantasy of a sequestered withdrawal from city life involves piles of books and the natural world, a library with a window on to some green shade.
These are the days that begin to chart a glide-path towards extinction. Instinctively, we hope for a soft landing, on grass, although experience suggests that the odds are against it. In truth, we are more likely to be besieged by Roth’s imminent ‘massacre’. Perhaps my descent has already started. As I was leaving the Observer offices today, I bumped into Amelia, a colleague, on her way to get a cappuccino. I asked what she was working on. ‘Ageing,’ she replied. ‘A series.’
‘Do tell me what you find out,’ I said, purposely not mentioning Every Third Thought.
‘Oh,’ she replied, with the insouciance of youth. ‘We’re all fucked.’
As this narrative draws to its conclusion in the summer of 2016, one friend – tormented by depression – has just committed suicide by drowning herself at dawn in the English Channel; another is dying by degrees from oesophageal cancer. Her father has just ‘passed away’, although with none of the serenity wrapped up in that phrase. A third . . . but I don’t want to go there.
Every week brings more tales of heartbreak, and it’s to this fearsome retribution that we need a riposte. Montaigne says that we should become familiar with death, which was plausible enough in the sixteenth century. But is that, however, a workable strategy in an age of death-defying medicine? Is it possible ‘To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us’? Today, is Montaigne’s exhortation feasible? ‘Let us’, he says, ‘adopt a way clean common to the contrary one; let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it; let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death.’ Perhaps we are obliged to make the attempt. Montaigne reminds us that ‘there is no place where death cannot find us – even if we constantly twist our heads about in all directions as in a suspect land.’
According to T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney (in ‘Fragment of an Agon’):
Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks . . .
‘In the long run, we are all dead,’ says J. M. Keynes, in a notoriously controversial sentence. This stark truth does not stop those final days from being complicated or troubling. Making the best kind of exit is an art, but the years are not kind to the would-be escape artists of senescence. When Time is at war with Youth, everyone must struggle to find some kind of equipoise.
At the beginning of summer 2016, during his final weeks, I made several visits to see Matthew, an old friend, who was suffering the last stages of leukaemia in a hospice. To start with, however well-versed one might have been in Montaigne’s ‘frequenting’ of death, there was not much sensible to say. The dying man was too much in denial about his condition, and fiercely over-committed to exercising his willpower for a short-term recovery. It would have been an act of cruelty to interrupt the comforts of his delirium.
Did his refusal to face the reality of his progressive disintegration actually help him? I debated this question with some of his circle. It was certainly his choice, but it closed down many avenues of companionship at the end. What do you say to a man in a hospice who is talking about getting better and going home next week? At the end, does it really help to ‘rage against the dying of the light’?
In such circumstances, what is going to soothe those who are approaching their last exit? What story, or what words, will provide any real or serious consolation? In death, there are many competing bereavements, a continuum of loss, on all sides. There will be sadness, grief, and even agony. But is it not also possible that some will be hoping for a release? The dying have a right to their decease. In this last moment, the last gasp of ‘nowness’, it may be language – the thing that makes us human – that offers another kind of escape. Even paradoxical sentences can conceal paradoxical therapy. As Shakespeare says at the end of King Lear, ‘This is not the worst, so long as we can say “This is the worst” ’.
In childhood, we repeat lines of poetry hardly knowing what they mean, and find delight in nonsense rhymes whose Zen master is Edward Lear:
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve.
Is it possible that, in those last moments of second childhood, there’s a solace to be found in the repetition of half-remembered lines? To the insignificance of men and women at the moment where they wait – in the classical myth – on the shores of infinity can be added the idea that the heart-beat of language might be a consolation. I like to think that, approaching this rite of passage, crossing the waters of forgetfulness into the dark night of oblivion, the sharp prick of rationality might blur into a new rhythm and a new sensation that sponsors the recognition of an intervention transcending human experience. Here’s more mystery. What, if anything, is there to be said about God (from whom, alas, there is no escape)?
I have a friend who jokes that she’s saving up the ‘three Gs’ – gardening, genealogy and God – for her old age. This, I think, summarizes a fairly typical English response to issues of faith. It’s here that I concede inadequacy and defeat. For better or worse, the literature devoted to questions of belief is simply too vast and too profound to be encompassed in a short book like Every Third Thought.
*
With the ‘dying of the light’, there are some obvious and alternative responses not mentioned by Dylan Thomas. Might there not be a strange exhilaration? Or an inarticulate recognition of imminent oblivion? Or the suffering of secret grief? (I have heard tales of the terminally ill shedding tears in their comas.) For one insight into issues of belief at the moment of dying, I found myself turning to literature, to a new reading of A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis.
On the face of it, this classic of bereavement describes the agony of an annihilating loss. However, as an essay-journal, A Grief Observed opens up many consoling avenues of inquiry into the conundrum of God’s place in the wild darkness surrounding the twenty-first-century deathbed.
‘Jack’ Lewis had always been a man tortured by the tragedies of love, but now he was also addressing a crisis of faith. A Grief Observed was at first published pseudonymously. C. S. Lewis had written this little book after the death of his wife, as part of his reconciliation to her fate. A couple of years after his own death, in 1965, his estate gave permission for the book to be reissued under his own name, adding to its status as a contemporary classic.
‘No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.’ From its famous opening line, A G
rief Observed propels its readers into an abyss of mourning. Dramatizing bereavement, it confronts the desolate survivor (representative of all readers) with an overwhelming question: ‘Where is God?’ Lewis’s answer to this existential conundrum resonates through the rest of the book with a kind of tangible fury:
Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become . . . What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?
Even a confused non-believer like me can understand the sense of betrayal. For a believer, writes Lewis, ‘the conclusion I dread is not “So there’s no God after all”, but “So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.” ’ Much of his text has a self-help flavour that morphs into lyricism. There’s even a suggestion that the pain associated with sorrow might be commensurate with ageing. ‘Sorrow’, instructs Lewis, ‘turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop. There is something to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.’
The same might be said of the endgame. In this context, some of Lewis’s exclamations are raw and modern. ‘Cancer, and cancer, and cancer,’ he writes. ‘My mother, my father, my wife. I wonder who is next in the queue.’ Some of his best passages capture the vivid juxtaposition of consciousness and nihilism that can sometimes surround a deathbed:
We have seen the faces of those we know best so variously, from so many angles, in so many lights, with so many expressions – waking, sleeping, laughing, crying, eating, talking, thinking – that all the impressions crowd into our memory together and cancel out in a mere blur.
This blurring of competing sensations makes A Grief Observed so intensely varied that it’s susceptible to different readings. Above all, there’s Lewis’s refusal to be intimidated by death. He reports that his wife ‘had lost a great deal of her old horror of it.’ With this equanimity came a psychic dividend:
When the reality came, the name [Death] and the idea were in some degree disarmed. This is important. One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness. One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. The thing itself [Death] is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea.
Another important insight is Lewis’s recognition of solitude: he knows that in these dark moments, both he and she (his wife) are utterly alone. ‘You can’t really share someone else’s weakness,’ he writes, and their ‘fear or pain’. Having made a ruthless analysis of the human predicament, he draws his conclusions:
It is hard to have patience with people who say ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter’. You may as well say that birth doesn’t matter. I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that, in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?
Lewis is at pains to express the old truth that Life is a dangerous affair. ‘You will never discover how serious it was,’ he writes, ‘until the stakes are raised horribly high; until you find you are playing not for counters, but for every penny you have in the world.’ And so, finally, Lewis articulates a story about the ordinary person’s dialogue with ‘God’ that speaks to a secular society confronting death.
‘My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?’ Lewis’s ‘God’ remains as capricious and fleeting as life itself (‘There’s always a card in his hand we didn’t know about’). Wittily, he turns the idea of a ‘mystery’ back on humanity itself: ‘Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think.’
I find this a provocative and appealing line of commentary. If we are going to imagine a dialogue with God, we have to be able to imagine how that might go in the delirium of the endgame. Lewis is on to this. He welcomes the irrational side of the discussion. ‘All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask . . . are like that.’ On this perplexing and paradoxical note, we return to that quotidian reality, beloved of Hollywood: No one knows anything.
As Lewis puts it: ‘The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like a drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs.’ Learning not to ‘clutch and grab’ at explanations might be the first step towards a reconciliation with the all-important idea of acceptance.
The great song-writer Leonard Cohen was always a resonant voice of clarity, with deep inner resources of wisdom. Towards the end of 2016, shortly before he died from a fall, he discussed his future as an artist, and confided that he might never release some of the songs on which he had been working. But he was at peace with that: ‘Maybe I’ll get a second wind,’ he told the New Yorker. ‘I don’t know. But I don’t dare attach myself to a spiritual strategy. I don’t dare do that. I’ve got some work to do. Take care of business. I am ready to die. I hope it’s not too uncomfortable. That’s about it for me.’
*
In ‘Sabbath’, published just before his death, Oliver Sacks remains strikingly calm, writing in a kind of dream-state: ‘I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.’
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross would say that Sacks was articulating the final and valedictory stage of ‘Acceptance’, in which humanity becomes reconciled to its fate. This is perhaps most difficult when the world seems more than ever vivid, and alive, rich in possibilities. Sacks himself writes, ‘I am now face to face with dying, but I am not finished with living.’
How to find appropriate words for this kind of reconciliation? It will not be easy. Our unquenchable instinct is to place ourselves at the centre of worldly struggles, and to exercise willpower. We are always beating back into the past, in Fitzgerald’s famous words, like ‘boats against the current’. Yet, at some point, humanity’s instinct for self-assertion has to open a negotiation with the armies of the night.
I think, now, that we should make peace in order to be at peace. It’s strange to imagine the world without our presence, and our contribution. How on earth will it survive? Behind the arrogance of this thought lurks the paradoxical truth that the only world we know is the world we have experienced, and perceived, for ourselves. ‘Nowness’ is the best we can hope for. This is a world that will – indeed must – die with us. While there is no satisfying conclusion, part of any ultimate reconciliation must be about coming to terms with transience and its associated mystery. Einstein once said: ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.’
Thus the ‘nowness’ of things in all their mystery, properly recognized, is a necessary admission of human transience within an infinitely unfathomed universe. On this reading, mortality places mankind at the heart of a vivid but inconstant reality that is immeasurably more profound than the temporal concerns of the heroic self. This is a theme that the American novelist Marilynne Robinson has often addressed in her public utterances. Tellingly, in The Givenness of Things, Robinson admits how, as she approached seventy, she abruptly and inexplicably encountered a new sense of ‘nowness’:
I know my life is drawing to an end. The strangeness of life on earth first of all, and then of everything that takes my attention, is very moving to me now. It
feels freshly seen, like a morning that is exceptional only for the atmosphere it has of utter, unimpeachable newness, no matter how many times old Earth has tottered around the sun.
‘Sometimes’, concludes Robinson, ‘I am so struck by an image or an idea that I cannot sleep nights.’
The sleepless mind might tell itself fearful tales in the darkness, but the mind suffused with ‘nowness’ creates a better narrative for the fretful self. As a non-believer, I am glad to entertain the possibility of being pleasantly surprised. I have lived with the mystery of the brain, and I think I am happy to fade into a mystery beyond the magic of the cortex. Intellectually, that seems like the best bet for the future.
20
A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY
Fear no more the heat of the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
William Shakespeare, Cymbeline
Finally, it is the last day of summer, 2016. I am sitting under a tree, with a pile of books, a folder of notes, and my laptop. I have just completed a month in the country during which I’ve brought my story so far up to date, perhaps hoping to have negotiated some kind of private armistice with the demons of existential mystery.
I used to say that, as a stroke recoverer, I believed in celebrating normality and the active life, as far as possible. Towards the end of My Year Off, I even compiled a list of Dos and Don’ts. Here, at the end of Every Third Thought, that list has become distilled and simplified:
Every Third Thought Page 17