Nothing to Be Frightened Of Read Online Free PDF Page B

said, and did say, that it was “my age”—as if, now that the end was nearer, metaphysical caution and brute fear were weakening my resolve. But she would have been wrong. Awareness of death came early, when I was thirteen or fourteen. The French critic Charles du Bos, friend and translator of Edith Wharton, created a useful phrase for this moment: le réveil mortel. How best to translate it? “The wake-up call to mortality” sounds a bit like a hotel service. “Death-knowledge,” “death-awakening”?—rather too Germanic. “The awareness of death”?—but that suggests a state rather than a particular cosmic strike. In some ways, the (first) bad translation of du Bos’s phrase is the good one: it is like being in an unfamiliar hotel room, where the alarm clock has been left on the previous occupant’s setting, and at some ungodly hour you are suddenly pitched from sleep into darkness, panic, and a vicious awareness that this is a rented world.
    My friend R. recently asked me how often I think about death, and in what circumstances. At least once each waking day, I replied; and then there are the intermittent nocturnal attacks. Mortality often gatecrashes my consciousness when the outside world presents an obvious parallel: as evening falls, as the days shorten, or towards the end of a long day’s hiking. A little more originally, perhaps, my wake-up call frequently shrills at the start of a sports event on television, especially, for some reason, during the Five (now Six) Nations rugby tournament. I told R. all this, apologizing for what might seem a self-indulgent dwelling on the subject. He replied: “Your death-thoughts seem HEALTHY. Not sicko like [our mutual friend] G. Mine are v. v. sicko. Always have been = DO IT NOW type. Shotgun-in-mouth. Much improved since Thames Valley Police came and removed my twelve-bore because they’d heard me on Desert Island Discs. Now have only [his son’s] airgun. No good. No blasto. So we WILL HAVE AN OLD AGE TOGETHER.”
    People used to talk more readily about death: not death and the life to come, but death and extinction. In the 1920s, Sibelius would go to the Kämp restaurant in Helsinki and join the so-called “lemon table”: the lemon being the Chinese symbol of death. He and his fellow-diners—painters, industrialists, doctors, and lawyers—were not just permitted, but required to talk about death. In Paris, a few decades previously, the loose group of writers at the Magny dinners—Flaubert, Turgenev, Edmond de Goncourt, Daudet, and Zola—would discuss the matter in an orderly and companionable way. All were atheists, or serious agnostics; death-fearing but not death-avoiding. “People like us,” Flaubert wrote, “should have the religion of despair. One must be equal to one’s destiny, that’s to say, impassive like it. By dint of saying ‘That is so! That is so!’ and of gazing down into the black pit at one’s feet, one remains calm.”
    I have never wanted the taste of a shotgun in my mouth. Compared to that, my fear of death is low-level, reasonable, practical. And one problem with gathering some new lemon table or Magny dinner to discuss the matter might be that some of those present would turn competitive. Why should mortality be less a matter for male boasting than cars, income, women, cock size? “Night sweats, screaming— Ha! —that’s primary-school stuff. You wait till you get to . . .” And so our private anguish might be shown up as not just banal but under-powered. MY FEAR OF DEATH IS BIGGER THAN YOURS AND I CAN GET IT UP MORE OFTEN.
    On the other hand, this would be one occasion when you would happily lose out in a male boasting session. One of the few comforts of death-awareness is that there is always—almost always—someone worse off than yourself. Not just R., but also our mutual friend G. He is the long-time holder of the thanatophobes’ gold medal for having been woken by le réveil mortel at the age of four ( four!