The Bible tells us that our allotted span is threescore years and
ten. Advances in medicine and public health—sanitation, for example—have
made nonsense of this in the developed countries of the West where life
expectancy is being pushed well up into the 80s, at least among the
affluent. Nevertheless, there comes to each of us the day when we become
aware that the grave is yawning or the crematorium doors are being held
open. Benjamin Franklin famously declared that “in this world nothing
can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” and though Apple,
Google, and many multinational corporations have made nonsense of that
second certainty, the first remains inescapable. Someday the worms or
the flames will have our body, and as you advance through your eighth
decade, you can’t avoid the awareness that that day may be any day now.
William Wordsworth wrote a great poem entitled “Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” but it’s intimations
of mortality that any stabbing chest pain or mysterious lump, or simply
feeling bloody awful a lot of the time, is more likely to provoke. “Old
age,” Charles de Gaulle wrote, “is a shipwreck,” or, as the author of
the Book of Ecclesiastes has it, the day comes “when the grasshopper
shall be a burden, and desire shall fail.” Too bad, in other words.
Mortality? Immortality? The question hangs over us all. It did so
even in the centuries when religious faith went largely unquestioned. As
Andrew Marvell, 17th-century poet, reminded his “coy mistress”—his
playing-hard-to-get girl, we might say now: “The grave’s a fine and
private place/But none, I think, do there embrace.” Too true they don’t.
Nevertheless, Marvell, like almost everybody of his time, surely
believed in the immortality of the soul, life after death, even
(probably) the resurrection of the body. Read the bloody annals of
history, and time and again you find men and women going to death on the
scaffold confident that this wasn’t the end. The Scots royalist
general, the Marquess of Montrose, in lines written the night before his
execution in 1650, anticipated that his body would be dismembered and
his ashes scattered, yet declared, “Lord! since thou know’st where all
these atoms are, I’m hopeful Thou’lt recover once my dust, And confident
Thou’lt raise me with the just.” A hundred years later one of the more
notorious scoundrels in Scottish history, the octogenarian Simon Fraser,
Lord Lovat, went serenely to have his head cut off on Tower Hill,
declaring that he expected to be in paradise by noon—though there were
some who thought that as a convicted traitor and unconvicted rapist,
Lovat was more likely to find himself in the other place.
“Mortality? Immortality? The question hangs over us all.”
That was then. What about now? Some seventy years ago George Orwell wrote that the decline of belief in personal immortality was one of the
most remarkable features of the 20th century. Clearly, as he admitted,
the belief in life after death hadn’t quite disappeared. But the
certainty had diminished. People might still recite the Apostles’ Creed
with its affirmation of belief in “the Resurrection of the Body and the
Life Everlasting,” but did they believe as their forefathers had? Even
bishops of the Church of England might, if pressed on the question,
express no more than a belief in the survival of a sort of something
after death.
You may think Orwell exaggerated. He probably did exaggerate. We all,
surely, know people who believe with what appears to be absolute
confidence in the immortality of the soul and the life everlasting.
Moreover, even the most skeptical, attending a funeral service and
listening to the words of the Bible or prayer book, are likely to be
moved and, for a moment at least, to question their own skepticism,
doubt their unbelief. Nevertheless, Orwell was right, at least to this
extent: that the 20th century was the first in the Christian era in
which agnosticism was common and atheism generally acceptable. The trend
has accelerated since he wrote about it. Church attendance has
continued to fall. The number of people who describe themselves as being
of no faith has continued to rise. Belief in the immortality of the
soul—let alone the resurrection of the body—continues to dwindle, and I
find it hard to believe that many now agree with Peter Pan, who declared
that “to die will be an awfully big adventure.”
This skepticism hasn’t invaded other religions, or at least not
Islam. The readiness of Islamist suicide bombers to go happily, or at
least willingly, to their death attests to their belief in an afterlife.
Some may even eagerly look forward to the 76 virgins reputedly promised
them in their Muslim paradise, no matter how unlikely it is that there
can be quite so many dead virgins waiting there to welcome them. For
many in the West, however, it is precisely this sort of belief that
leads them to regard Islam as a backward religion.
Few of us, I would surmise, now imagine a future life in the
old-fashioned sort of paradise with angels strumming harps and all that,
even if we imagine any sort of life after death. Yet even if we retain
some vestige of belief in a sort of heaven, we seem to have abandoned
the idea of hell. There are doubtless still hellfire preachers who
conjure up its horrors to thrill their congregation, but they are on the
fringes. The established churches seem to have sidelined hell. This is
curious if only because hell was, for most of the Christian era,
imagined more vividly and precisely than heaven. Read Dante’s Inferno
or look at the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, and you find a detailed
representation of everlasting torment. For hundreds of years, as George
Steiner wrote, “the imagination dwelt on the flaying, the racking, the
mockery of the damned, in a place of whips and hell-hounds, of ovens and
stinking air.” Devout Christians like Dr. Johnson were awestruck and
terrified by the images and idea of hell. We may now mostly have thrust
the idea of hell aside, though, as Steiner remarked, it was only when we
no longer believed in hell after death that it was translated by the
Nazis into the hell on earth of the death camps. Indeed hell on earth,
hell in life, is an undeniable reality. Look at Syria today. Look at the
devilish practices of ISIS.
For most of us in the West such horrors are, happily, confined to our
television screens. They are things that happen, repulsively,
appallingly, to other people. The prospect of our own death is
different, and that prospect eventually becomes inescapable, either on
account of some terminal illness or simply because of age. For decades
you may never think of it, but unless you are suddenly carried off
without warning, the day comes when you hear death shuffling up on you,
when, if you don’t believe in an afterlife, you sense that the curtain
is going to come down.
It’s
reading once again the last diary of my old friend, the playwright
Simon Gray, that has got me brooding on death. This volume, Coda,
is a record of his thoughts, feelings, and experiences after being
diagnosed with lung cancer and confronted with the reality of imminent
death. It’s brave, melancholy, and witty—he was one of the sharpest and
funniest men I have known. At one time he contemplates the question of
suicide, as many must do in such circumstances. “I can always kill
myself as soon as I find that living is an agony, but how? is the
question…how exactly does one kill oneself in a fashion that causes the
least distress to those one loves—and the least inconvenience to many
people that one doesn’t love, but has no right to inconvenience?” These
are questions to which there is no satisfactory answer, and I suppose
that people commit suicide only when they have reached a stage at which
they no longer care what the answer might be. Ending the self is
unavoidably a selfish act, and I suppose that if you don’t believe in
God and divine punishment and all that, it’s imagining the distress and
inconvenience you cause that serves as the principal deterrent. Simon
didn’t kill himself. He argued himself out of the temptation, and indeed
Coda ends happily, optimistically, with the cancer in
remission and the doctors promising him two years more of life. I had a
cheerful email from him giving me the news and then, characteristically,
grumbling that he must now find a subject for a play to write. He never
did. The next news I had was of his death—sudden, from a heart attack,
not his cancer. That’s death’s way. Cheated in some fashion, it will
nevertheless creep up on you.
Nowadays, of course, we’re in a real fix about death. No longer
believing in the life everlasting, medical science, doctors, nurses,
etc. combine and contrive to make this one last as long as possible,
dragging out existence even when the patient has been reduced to a
vegetable condition. I know nobody who doesn’t shrink from that
prospect, and yet it confronts millions of us. “Why prolong life, save
to prolong pleasure?” asked that tough old pagan Norman Douglas. A good
question, and he answered it himself by taking an overdose when the
prospect of pleasure seemed to have vanished. Unless you believe, like
Hamlet, that “the Almighty has set his canon ’gainst self-slaughter,” it
seems a good way out, preferable to dragging out existence, mindless
and incontinent, in a geriatric ward. Still, no matter how the end
comes, the bell tolls for us all.
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