End of the Road

...cameo roles are played by Thomas Browne, Edmund Wilson, Philip Larkin, and Bertrand Russell...

...When queried if he wants immortality here on earth, he replies: “. . . how about a little mortality...

...I found myself not wanting to read about death at night...

...big-picture refl ections on long-term evolutionary theory, which holds out a future that fi gures to leave human beings no more complex than amoebas seem to us today, Barnes fi nds no less depressing to contemplate...

...Death’s alarm rings more insistently for some than others...

...And what, exactly, is the joke anyway...

...Only when we have taught ourselves how to die can we begin to live...

...Death, not to put too fi ne a point on it, seems to him a very raw deal, and Nothing To Be Frightened Of is an extended threnody on just how raw it is...

...As a thanatophobe and a Francophile, it is only natural that Barnes cite and quote many French writers on the subject of death...

...Fear of death will leave us without rest or tranquility, turning anxiety, anguish, and fear into our nearest companions...

...And so it is that Montaigne, Pascal, Stendhal, Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, and Zola are all brought briefl y onstage in Barnes’s book, then whisked off...

...Barnes thinks it the most rational thing in the world...

...Although Montaigne’s is easily the best, nonreligious manual for dealing with death, Julian Barnes doesn’t buy it...

...The mortality rate, unlike the stock market, has remained steady, never once having fallen below 100 percent...

...I incline to think that the strongest feeling Mother ever allowed herself was severe irritation,” he writes, “while Father no doubt knew all about boredom...

...No one wants to die, but the only thing worse than dying would be living forever...

...He is in his early sixties, childless by choice (he tells us), and recently made a widower upon the death of his wife, Pat Kavanagh, a well-known London literary agent...

...Because of its dolorous subject, Nothing To Be Frightened Of reads as if twice its actual length...

...Rejecting Christianity, uninterested in other religions, he rejects the possibility of God...

...Because, as an old radio comedy show tagline had it, “’Tain’t funny, McGee...

...Barnes claims to hear it at least once a day, often more: “as evening falls, as the days shorten, or towards the end of a long day’s hiking,” and other, less explainable times (he mentions its usual intrusion during the 6 Nations rugby tournament...

...Yet for all his knowingness, one of the things Barnes doesn’t know is how to rid himself of night sweats over the idea of his own death...

...God, it too often seems, as the novelist Frederic Raphael says, does irony better than He does justice...

...Both died in impersonal surroundings— his father in a hospital, his mother in a nursing home—among strangers...

...Eliminate death and life becomes shapeless, a dud, perpetual hell on earth—something that Julian Barnes and the rest of us would all be truly frightened of...

...Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author, most recently, of Fred Astaire...

...The point of Montaigne’s essay is to take the fear out of dying...

...happily proclaiming their authors’ atheism...

...Supposing that death could be eliminated and life could go on forever, Barnes sets out the manifold possibilities it would present to him in particular: I would become Jewish (or try, or bluff...

...But then, nobody ever claimed Barnes was a Christian—he least of all...

...for reasons of limited space and food supply, further generations would be unthinkable...

...A genius, Pascal, but not many laughs...

...Jules Renard, the 19th-century French writer, whose name and aphorisms come up frequently in this book, in his Journal notes: “It is when faced with death that we all turn most bookish...

...Best known for the novel Flaubert’s Parrot, he would not, I think, disclaim or disdain being called a Flaubertian, for so he seems in his artistic taste, temperament, and general outlook...

...No, death is someone else, most assuredly not the person dying, having the last laugh...

...Instead of describing his own tribulations he turns to the deaths of his grandparents and, more emphatically, his parents, both of whom died at the reasonable age of 82, his father after a series of strokes, his mother through a combination of strokes and dementia...

...Julian Barnes reports no personal skirmishes with death, no accounts of suffering serious injuries or diseases, no scarifying surgeries...

...Nor, because of the heavy freight of depression it carries, is it a book that can be read at just any time...

...As Montaigne points out, some of the “most execrable and ill-famed men I have known, men plunged into every kind of abomination, died deaths which were wellordered and in all respects perfectly reconciled” while good men and women have died hideously...

...Julian Barnes is a stylish writer, whose major fl aw is his relentless cleverness, which derives in good part from his knowingness, a fl aw shared by the English writers of his generation...

...A novelist, a member of the generation of English writers that includes Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes is the Francophile son of secondary school teachers of French...

...Keep in mind the fact that one has already lived as long as one has is, in itself, extraordinary, for vast numbers of people have died much younger...

...Remember that no matter what the state of your health, or what precautions you have taken, there are no guarantees that you will have the least say in how your death will come about: Aeschylus, after all, was “killed by the shell of a tortoise which slipped from the talons of an eagle in fl ight...

...Much as he loved life, death must have been in some measure a release...

...At times, one cannot help wondering if Nothing To Be Frightened Of isn’t Julian Barnes’s contribution to the recent books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, & Co...

...let us have nothing more often in mind than death...

...Half...

...Each of us would live for himself alone...

...Many are the exits from life, and few of them smooth...

...Strangely for a man drawn to the dour, he fails to quote Pascal’s depiction of the human condition: “Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others...

...Worse news yet, justice doesn’t seem to enter into this, life’s fi nal transaction...

...Julian Barnes, fair to say after reading Nothing To Be Frightened Of, his ironically tinged tirade on the unreasonableness of death, doesn’t get the joke, and writes at some length about his confusion and consternation over the matter...

...Of his expectation for his own death, Barnes writes: I imagine I shall die rather as my father did, in a hospital, in the middle of the night...

...Better to recognize death for what it is: the fi rst fact of life—everything that lives must die...

...He reports his mother remarking, about her philosopher and novelist sons: “One of my sons writes a book I can read but can’t understand, and the other writes books I can understand but can’t read...

...Barnes reports that his hero Flaubert “was suspicious of militant atheism” and Barnes senses that the only confi dent answer to the spectre of death, apart from the dignifi ed resignation that comes with accepting your fate, lies in religion...

...This is an image of the human condition...

...Barnes fi nds everything to be frightened of about death: its probable pain, its likely squalor, its surprise, more likely shock, element...

...and—well, one needn’t go on...

...C’est la mort...

...heart attacks and strokes...

...But above all he cannot quite get his mind around its promise of the Big O—not Oscar Robertson nor Barack Obama, but Oblivion, the state of absolute nullity that, for a faithless man or woman, is the fi rst and fi nally crushing result of death...

...This is the jokey Julian, who plays throughout this book, except that he’s not quite joking, not really...

...Nothing To Be Frightened Of is, of course, an ironic title...

...These biographical details are noteworthy, for Nothing To Be Frightened Of, though not intended as an autobiography, is nonetheless a highly autobiographical book...

...His brother thinks fear of death irrational...

...People who have told him that fi nding faith would wipe out his terror and alleviate his anxiety about death are talking to a wall, and not to the Wailing Wall, either...

...you could, after all, long ago have been dead and not here to be eating that splendid veal chop and drinking that glass of magnifi cent cabernet sauvignon...

...I could discover quite new sorts of disappointment...

...Death is a restaurant with an enormous menu, not much on it appetizing...

...various dementias, Alzheimer’s currently most famous among them...

...His brother pegged out at 23, hit above the ear by a tennis ball...

...I expect that a nurse or doctor will say that I just “slipped away,” and that someone was with me at the end, whether or not this will have been the case...

...But who, and why...

...It is striking how unanimous Montaigne’s friends are,” his biographer Donald Frame writes, “in his cheerful courage in the face of acute pain and death...

...More likely, though, it would be a ponderous thumping bore, with each of us telling our same anecdotes and jokes, enacting our same self-dramatizations, millennium after millennium...

...When Montaigne argues that we die to make room for others to come on this earth, as earlier generations made room for us, Barnes replies: “Yes, but I didn’t ask them to...

...The trick, for Montaigne, is “to deprive death of its strangeness...

...He quotes Sir Thomas Browne: “For a pagan there might be some motives to be in love with life, but, for a Christian to be amazed at [that is, terrifed of] death, I cannot see how he can escape this dilemma— that he is too sensible of this life, or hopeless of the life to come...

...The best writer on death is Montaigne, whose essay “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die” provides, in effect, a how-to on dying...

...Not merely death but dying itself worries Barnes...

...Montaigne avers that he himself is ready to go, though he would like death to fi nd him at his regular chores—planting his cabbages, perhaps...

...Imagine life without death,” Jules Renard wrote...

...The truth of life,” as Santayana noted, can “be seen only in the shadow of death: living and dying [are] simultaneous and inseparable...

...let us frequent it, let us get used to it...

...I expect my departure to have been preceded by severe pain, fear, and exasperation at the imprecise or euphemistic use of language around me...

...cancers of every kind, quick and slow killing, physically devastating and degrading...

...Consider, too, that in having death always in mind, your own pleasures while alive, far from being diminished, ought to be intensifi ed...

...He found, he tells us, religion and the guilt it brings “distracted [me] from [adolescent] masturbation...

...Montaigne’s fi rst bit of instruction is to familiarize oneself with death...

...nor could I bear to begin my day by reading it fresh out of bed in the morning...

...Barnes sashays between anecdotage about great artists and their (in his pages) inevitably horrifi c deaths and autobiographical accounts of his life with his parents and his disagreements on the subject of death with his older brother, a former philosophy don now living in France...

...OK, I’ll settle for a quarter...

...Throughout Nothing To Be Frightened Of Barnes pursues his mother in death as relentlessly as fear of death pursues him in life...

...Barnes adds that he is Browne’s unsatisfactory Christian—“too sensible of this life, or hopeless of the life to come— except that I am not a Christian...

...so, too, are the views and fates of Ravel, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius...

...But religion is impossible for him, and the reason is that he makes too literal demands upon it...

...No other religion, one gathers, has had the least allure for him...

...This terror set in at early adolescence, and far from diminishing, seems to have increased in intensity and frequency as the disappointing event itself draws ever nearer...

...Barnes does not like the odds offered by Pascal’s Wager, which holds that it makes sense to believe in God even if He may not exist, or for that matter the formulation of the bet, and suggests, instead, that “God might prefer the honest doubter to the sycophantic chancer...

...The reigning tic of the previous generation of English writers, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin most notable among them, was heavy reliance on a no less relentless irony, in which they all may be said eventually to have drowned...

...But “when death does suddenly appear, it will bear no new warning for me...

...He doesn’t quite see the point of it...

...He presents her as domineering, sarcastic, stinting of affection, the stifl ing cause behind his father’s laconic manner...

...To pretend it doesn’t exist, or to put it out of mind, is, according to him, perhaps the greatest mistake one can make...

...He died at 57, fairly long-lived for the 16th century...

...Every day you would want to kill yourself...

...The question, for Barnes, is why do we have to die at all...

...Not, as we should say nowadays, a fun book, Nothing To Be Frightened Of, despite Barnes’s repeated efforts at gallows humor...

...Physically, near as one can tell, he has himself had a pretty good run...

...No one knows what awaits behind the door: One of the dread diseases of the nerves (Parkinson’s, Lou Gehrig’s, Huntington’s...

...Barnes grew up in a household without religion “so,” as he writes, “I had no faith to lose...

...One assumes her son Julian is the latter...

...Montaigne, who died from a combination of illnesses, played his own part well...

...It is a book that would make a fi ne gift for someone one doesn’t really like...

...We must all, he instructs, “have our boots on, ready to go...

...This seems to have worked for Montaigne, who himself never believed he would be long-lived...

...What is more, as he doesn’t in the least mind telling us, he is terrifi ed of death...

...He also includes material from Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die, a study of the physiology of death so brutal it would bring Mean Joe Green to his knees in tears...

...Happiness in life,” as Montaigne had it, “may never be attributed to any man until we have seen him act out the last scene in his play, which is indubitably the hardest...

...Faith,” he writes, “is about believing precisely what, according to all known rules, ‘could not have happened.’” Barnes has himself never felt the invisible, and as a writer, a word-man, is insuffi ciently impressed with the unspoken...

...He shows little mercy, and less forgiveness, for his mother, as she pits her obdurate personality against the strokes that left her right side paralyzed and her speech badly damaged...

...Familiarity with the notion of death in him breeds neither contempt nor content—only fear...

...One looks great on Friday and is discovered to have a brain tumor the following Tuesday...

...I could leave home earlier, live abroad, have children, not write books, plant hornbeams, join a utopian community, sleep with all the wrong people (or at least, some different wrong people), become a drug addict, fi nd God, do nothing...

...End of the Road On the journey to oblivion BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN If death is an old joke that comes to each of us afresh, how is it no one is laughing...

...He never attended church regularly, and regards the story of Christianity as “a great novel,” nothing more...

...Yes, without death, life would be a dream, sha-boom, sha-boom...

...Le r?veil mortel, which Barnes translates as “the wake-up call to mortality,” comes to people at different ages and stages in their lives...

...He wants religion to be accounted for and defended on coolly rational grounds...

...When asked to think how many have died before him, and even how many are likely to die on the same day as he, he replies: “True, and some of them will be as pissed off as I am about it...

...those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn...

...He is almost too pleased not to be a Christian...

...Cryonics (or deep-freezing the body in the hope of fi nding future cures) is put under consideration and found no solution...