The Mystery That Isn't

I just finished this Frank Kermode article in the New York Review of Books about the English writer Julian Barnes, who is obsessed with death. Barnes describes himself as a thanatophobe, or death-hater, who (according to Kermode) "dreams of oblivion and wakes in the night howling with terror." Barnes "insists that his fears are entirely rational," but Kermode never tells us what they are, which leaves the impression that Kermode shares them, or thinks he does, and assumes everyone else does likewise.

Barnes's novels, which are apparently offered as explorations of the subject of death, sound rather unpromising. One of Barnes's characters is asked "is it death itself he fears, or oblivion?" He replies that he fears both. His interlocutor, supposedly a quasi-ominscient computer, cannot think of a better response than that everybody dies. The character then offers the closest thing to an explanation for his fear Kermode shares with us, which is to say that it "results not from the fear of pain but from 'the fear of inevitability of non-pain.'"

None of this makes any sense at all, and I think that fact points toward a central feature of common Western notions about death, which is an a priori assumption that it constitutes some great deep mystery, intrinsically exempt from the rules we use to evaluate other theories and ideas. Certainly Barnes seems to approach it that way, and Kermode is apparently in sync with him. He concludes the article with the observation that in dealing with death, "[i]t seems that nothing really helps any more. We know nothing about the matter that entitles us to have an opinion on it."

This statement is simply bewildering. It suggests that death is too obscure to enable us to understand anything about it, but what seems more likely is that Barnes and Kermode choose not to accept what they understand perfectly well. The most obvious and likely analog for death has been known to humans since they first came to understand what an electrical circuit is. Death is a turning-off, like opening a circuit—though given that "opening" implies a switch, it would more accurate to say, like breaking a circuit. The organism turns off and becomes inanimate matter. There is no mystery in this.

To be sure, we can create a mystery by imagining that death has further implications. Most obviously, if we posit a soul, meaning an immaterial reflection or manifestation of the self, then we have to account for what happens to it upon death of the body. Perhaps the soul survives; indeed, if it is truly immaterial and distinct from the body, how can it die? But mysteries like these are the product of pure fancy. There is no reason to posit a soul, no question it answers—or answers satisfactorily.

In any event, these do not seem to be the mysteries that render Barnes and Kermode so intellectually helpless. Nobody outside the churches wants to argue about souls any more. So Barnes has a character say that he fears oblivion, which simply makes no sense. We experience oblivion every night when we sleep (excluding of course the time when we are dreaming). Death is simply a dreamless sleep from which we do not awaken. Lamentable it may be, deplorable, even tragic—but how can it be frightening?

Death makes us want to ask, "How can it be that this wonderful thing—me—will be simply turned off, like a lightbulb?" But this is not a true mystery, for it is perfectly obvious how it can be, and indeed how it is. The mystery is better stated, "How could it be ... ?" How could the universe, God, reality be so cruel? But this is mere self-pity, and of a particularly toxic kind. The universe inflicts this seeming cruelty the same way it awards us the great gift of life in the first place—and in the case of us humans, not just life but intellect: Because that's how animate matter works. And the universe does not hear our complaining, because to it we are mere atoms in a vast fabric. Very lucky atoms, in our ability to feel and think and taste and hear, but still atoms, who in the nature of things must give way to new and, eventually, improved ones.

Mortality is the name of the game as long as nature is in charge. If we live long enough—if we do not destroy ourselves before we reach our potential—we may conquer death. I suspect when we do we will learn that living forever is not what it's cracked up to be. Still, I think it's legitimate to wish that we lived longer, provided we stayed young enough to enjoy it. But acknowledging that wish is a far cry from dissolving into puddles of fear merely because we're doomed to wear out and stop running some day.

Needless to say, I'll be giving Mr. Barnes a rather wide berth in my own journey to oblivion.