In telling you about Julian Barnes’ new book Nothing To Be Frightened Of I’ve tried to show restraint in excessively quoting from it, but as you’ll see, it isn’t easy.
It’s contradictory to think of a book about dying that ends up celebrating living, but Barnes accomplishes this with gracious and infectious good humor. Yes, it is elegiac, but it doesn’t hurt.
It’s not that, like W.C. Fields supposedly replied to a friend’s astonishment at finding him reading the Bible on his deathbed, “I’m looking for a loophole,” Barnes is looking for another way out of the predicament of living. It’s rather that his examination is so much better, amusing, and thoughtful than we could manage (or at least I could manage) on our own. He writes deprecating newspaper headlines about his own demise, as “London Man Dies, Not Many Hurt.” Many authors have discovered the mirth in non-existence; Woody Allen, saying “I don’t fear dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
Barnes seems to be saying that the idea of dying is a lot worse if you haven’t been busy living as well as you can. He quotes a rather unsolicitous Julius Caesar answering one of his old soldiers who asks for permission to end it all, “What makes you think you have a life worth living?” In other words, why bother. He has Arthur Koestler asking “Is it better to die before all your works are forgotten, or after?”
In pondering the deaths of his mother and father, Barnes recalls them as parents and how he responded, liking or disliking, protesting or agreeing. So, he sees himself as reflected in their lives through the years as he matures.
Barnes instructs us: “We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten. We remember our parents through most of their adult lives; our grandparents through their last third; beyond that, perhaps, lies a great-grandfather with a scratchy beard and a rank odor.”
Near the end of the book Barnes reminds us that with possibly six billion more years for the earth to run, no living thing remotely like us will be alive to see it.
Lou Wallis
It’s contradictory to think of a book about dying that ends up celebrating living, but Barnes accomplishes this with gracious and infectious good humor. Yes, it is elegiac, but it doesn’t hurt.
It’s not that, like W.C. Fields supposedly replied to a friend’s astonishment at finding him reading the Bible on his deathbed, “I’m looking for a loophole,” Barnes is looking for another way out of the predicament of living. It’s rather that his examination is so much better, amusing, and thoughtful than we could manage (or at least I could manage) on our own. He writes deprecating newspaper headlines about his own demise, as “London Man Dies, Not Many Hurt.” Many authors have discovered the mirth in non-existence; Woody Allen, saying “I don’t fear dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
Barnes seems to be saying that the idea of dying is a lot worse if you haven’t been busy living as well as you can. He quotes a rather unsolicitous Julius Caesar answering one of his old soldiers who asks for permission to end it all, “What makes you think you have a life worth living?” In other words, why bother. He has Arthur Koestler asking “Is it better to die before all your works are forgotten, or after?”
In pondering the deaths of his mother and father, Barnes recalls them as parents and how he responded, liking or disliking, protesting or agreeing. So, he sees himself as reflected in their lives through the years as he matures.
Barnes instructs us: “We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten. We remember our parents through most of their adult lives; our grandparents through their last third; beyond that, perhaps, lies a great-grandfather with a scratchy beard and a rank odor.”
Near the end of the book Barnes reminds us that with possibly six billion more years for the earth to run, no living thing remotely like us will be alive to see it.
Lou Wallis
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