Every Third Thought Read online

  In a moment of free association, something pops into mind, and I find myself referring to The Death of Ivan Ilych, the little book I’ve been carrying in my pocket for weeks. As we talk about Tolstoy, I recall a passage from the opening of Darwin’s Worms in which, considering Darwin and Freud, Phillips writes:

  [They] thought of themselves as trying to tell the truth about nature, and nature was what the truth was about. One could only understand human life by understanding its place in nature. And the three truths they took for granted about ‘Man’ were: that Man is an animal, that he must adapt sufficiently to his environment or he will die, and that he dies conclusively. They both declared, in different ways, the death of immortality.

  Crucially, for that all-important reconciliation with the ‘third thought’, Phillips locates the thrill of human experience, and the meaning of life in the ephemeral nature of being:

  After the death of God, it is transience that takes up our time. Nature is careless with ‘her’ creations. She is endlessly fertile, but to no discernible end. One couldn’t believe in Nature in the way that one could believe in God . . . Whatever it is now that sustains life does not seem to care about its quality. Suffering is only a problem for us.

  Phillips goes on to quote Wallace Stevens, ‘The brilliance of the earth is the brilliance of every paradise’. Stevens decides that ‘one can only write poems of the earth, as Darwin and Freud did, if one is happily convinced that there is nowhere else to go.’ In a powerful conclusion, he writes that ‘When transience is not merely an occasion for mourning, we will have inherited the earth.’

  In the project of inheriting the earth, the quest for a new language for the pragmatic reconciliation of life and death, and ways of living and dying, must take us into the universe of the imagination – into fiction. The greatest novels inspire a kind of dream in which thoughts and feelings, memories and experience blur within a cathedral of language: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, for example; or Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. Much more compressed, but equally brilliant, are several short novels which make perfect bedside reading. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Even in extremis, humanity retains a narrative gene: it’s to myths and stories we must inevitably return.

  Works of literature fill the void of faith, but in the end, everything goes pear-shaped. The best-laid plans fail. Trust in good health gets betrayed. Futures go south. Rational projections spin awry; families implode. Chance, fate, old age, mortality, and finally oblivion take over. Bereavement cuts through the hopes of the living like a scythe.

  With no certainties, the mundane details of everyday behaviour become a relentless improvisation. Religion falters; and optimism self-destructs. Personality disintegrates under the merciless shell-fire of fear. Confronted with the whirlwind of contingency, the human animal, reverting to type, hunkers down. Adam Phillips’ vision is right: under this bombardment, it is remarkable how humanity finds the resilience to cling on. And it will be words and language, the thing that makes us human, that will be sustained to the end.

  15

  LAST WORDS

  ‘It is profoundly interesting to know what the mind can still contain in the face of apparently certain death.’

  George Orwell

  Writers and their last exits occupy a special place in the literary imagination. Ever since Plato described his mentor’s noble death in The Last Days of Socrates, the conduct of that ultimate farewell, so enthralling to readers, has become a mini-genre: Henry James, on his deathbed, referring enigmatically to ‘the distinguished thing’; Freud refusing drugs stronger than aspirin so he could think clearly, before finally choosing the moment of his own death; John Updike, ready to give up, putting his head on his typewriter, because it was too hard to type up his final poems about dying, but then finding the strength to finish them anyway; and David Bowie, almost teasing at the end, writing of ‘the next stage’. In The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe acknowledges the mystery implicit in this subject: ‘It would be hard to pin down why I chose these particular people’ – Susan Sontag, Maurice Sendak, Dylan Thomas et al. ‘I was drawn to each one of them by instinct, felt some heat coming off their writing, some intuition that they could answer or complicate or refine the questions I was asking myself.’

  In Henry the Fifth, Shakespeare makes a famous and unforgettable nod to the fascination of such memorials in Mistress Quickly’s account of Falstaff’s passing:

  He parted just between twelve and one, even at the turning o’ the tide – for after I saw him fumble with the sheets, and play with flowers, and smile upon his finger’s end, I knew there was but one way. For his nose was as sharp as a pen, and he babbled o’ green fields. How now Sir John? quoth I. What, man! Be of good cheer. So he cried out, God, God, God, three or four times.

  Mistress Quickly, a practical Englishwoman of robust temperament, has no use for the consolations of faith; besides, she loves ‘Sir John’ and can hardly bear his loss:

  Now I, to comfort him, bid him that he should not think of God. I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet. So he bade me lay more clothes on his feet: I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were as cold as any stone; then I felt to his knees, and they were as cold as any stone, and so upward and upward, and all was as cold as any stone.

  Falstaff’s appeals to ‘God’ go to the heart of the deathbed scenario. And yet, at the end, with no possible postponement of the inevitable, there is only the enigma of faith. In a secular world, God and his comforts are strikingly absent for most people, but ideas about an afterlife still hover, like spectres, in the human imagination.

  In the hunt for clues to this mystery, ‘last words’ have a special place in the human imagination. A flash of wit, perhaps, or a last flourish of wisdom? Who knows? On learning that he was mortally ill, the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote a short autobiography, My Own Life, a valedictory personal account inspired by his final days:

  I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my disorder, and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits . . . I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.

  Was it Hume’s studied equanimity that piqued James Boswell’s curiosity? Did the obsessive biographer hope that the rendezvous of a great mind with the unfathomed vastness of eternity would inspire some special insight into the unknown? Certainly, he was an incorrigible nosy parker. So, in the summer of 1776, Boswell went to visit Hume on his deathbed. Literary ambulance-chasing has its macabre side. Boswell’s report of that last meeting is a classic of slightly creepy reverence, a kind of superior voyeurism:

  On Sunday forenoon, the 7 of July, being too late for church, I went to see Mr David Hume, who was returned from London and Bath, just a-dying.

  I found him alone, in a reclining posture in his drawing-room.

  He was lean, ghastly, and quite of an earthy appearance. He was dressed in a suit of grey cloth with white metal buttons, and a kind of scratch wig.

  ‘He seemed to be placid and even cheerful,’ noted Boswell. ‘He said he was just approaching to his end. I think those were his words.’ Boswell knew that Hume was a confirmed atheist, and he wanted to investigate his state of mind. Had there been any last-minute reconsiderations? A late return to faith, perhaps? ‘I know not how I contrived to get the subject of immortality introduced,’ he confessed. In Boswell’s telling, Hume’s response was robust and well-sourced:

  He said he never had entertained any belief in religion since he had begun to read Locke . . .

  I asked him if he was not religious when he was young.

  He said he was, and he used to read The Whole Duty of Man; that he made an abstract from the catalogue of vices at the end of it, and examined himself by this, leaving out such vices as he ha
d no chance of committing.

  Boswell, the biographical bloodhound, continued his reportage: Hume then said flatly that ‘the morality of every religion was bad’, and, added, in deadly earnest, that ‘when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal.’

  Boswell continued:

  I had a strong curiosity to be satisfied if he persisted in disbelieving a future state even when he had death before his eyes.

  I was persuaded from what he now said, and from his manner of saying it, that he did persist. I asked him if it was not possible that there might be a future state. He answered that it was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist for ever.

  As the great atheist in his grey cloth suit, with his ‘lean and ghastly demeanour’, began to enumerate his objections to the possibility of an afterlife, Boswell faithfully recorded every detail:

  That immortality, if it were at all, must be general; that a great proportion of the human race has hardly any intellectual qualities; that a great proportion dies in infancy before being possessed of reason; yet all these must be immortal; that a porter who gets drunk by ten o’clock with gin must be immortal . . .

  Boswell then asked the philosopher the big question: Did the thought of approaching annihilation ever give him any uneasiness? Unfazed, Hume answered: ‘Not the least; no more than the thought that he had not been . . .’

  ‘Well,’ said I, ‘Mr Hume, I hope to triumph over you when I meet you in a future state; and remember you are not to pretend that you was joking with all this infidelity.’

  ‘No, no,’ said he. ‘But I shall have been so long there before you come that it will be nothing new.’

  Boswell admitted that he had conducted this conversation in ‘a style of good humour and levity’, but he was unrepentant.

  Perhaps it was wrong on so awful a subject. But as nobody was present, I thought it could have no bad effect. I however felt a degree of horror, mixed with a sort of wild, strange, hurrying recollection of my excellent mother’s pious instructions, of Dr Johnson’s noble lessons, and of my religious sentiments and affections during the course of my life.

  Boswell, puzzling over this brush with greatness and its meaning, wrote: ‘I could not but be assailed by momentary doubts while I had actually before me a man of such strong abilities and extensive inquiry dying in the persuasion of being annihilated.’ Finally, switching to a more elegiac mood, Boswell recalled an old memory of Hume that’s at once vivid, candid and revealing:

  He had once said to me, on a forenoon while the sun was shining bright, that he did not wish to be immortal. This was a most wonderful thought.

  Not only had Hume’s deathbed come to resemble a debating chamber, this scene is a reminder that death, in the past, was much wittier than our own heavily sedated exits. To another visitor, who asked the great atheist if he would not finally renounce the Devil and all his works, Hume is reported to have replied, drily: ‘Sir, now is not the time to be making new enemies.’

  *

  There is something pleasantly garrulous about Hume’s last exit. In the twenty-first century, the imminent death we are grappling with does not encourage conversation, but it does not let up, either.

  Today, in a more secular society, the best end-of-life writing often has a quasi-journalistic inspiration. Christopher Hitchens, who died too young at sixty-two, challenged his fate in Mortality, which was published posthumously in 2012. Hitchens first announced his condition (oesophageal cancer) in Vanity Fair, with a series of despatches from the place he called ‘Tumourville’. Similarly, Oliver Sacks reported his slow last exit in several moving pieces for the New York Times, posthumously collected in a short volume, Gratitude. Paul Kalanithi, a gifted neurosurgeon struck down in his thirties by lung cancer, planted the seed for When Breath Becomes Air in a New York Times op-ed article, ‘How Long Have I Got Left?’. It’s the pitiless reality of this final stretch that all we have got is: questions.

  2015–16 was a memorable year for departures, a reminder of Philip Roth’s verdict in Everyman that ‘Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre’. It began with the passing of Oliver Sacks towards the end of summer, on 28 August 2015. Just before he died, aged eighty-two, Sacks composed some last words, a valedictory piece entitled ‘Sabbath’:

  And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life—achieving a sense of peace within oneself.

  Soon after Sacks’ death, Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She remarked that ‘Life is beautiful, but too short, dammit.’ She added, coolly: ‘The fairest thing in this world is death – no one has ever managed to buy himself out of it.’ A few weeks later, Lisa Jardine died, and then Philip French, the Observer’s film critic.

  As the year turned, this ‘massacre’ continued with the deaths of David Bowie, and the actor Alan Rickman, both aged sixty-nine. Neither had ever seemed old to me: Bowie had composed the sound-track to our lives in the Seventies; Rickman had been a benign and constant presence on stage and screen. His death was another memento mori.

  Towards the end of January, the publisher George Weidenfeld died, and then Terry Wogan (a colleague said, ‘We thought he was immortal,’ a line stolen from P. G. Wodehouse on the death of his daughter Leonora).

  In March, there was more annihilation: the deaths of the magician Paul Daniels, the novelist Anita Brookner, and then the comedian Ronnie Corbett, who passed away on the same day as the architect Zaha Hadid.

  With the coming of spring, all these deaths seemed abstract enough. People die all the time. But then, it suddenly became personal. Idly surfing the net one day, I discovered – to my considerable astonishment – this entry:

  ‘Robert McCrum, obituary’ published in the state of Maine, USA.

  Needless to say, I hastened eagerly to catch up with my own demise:

  Saco & Mars Hill – Robert Phil McCrum, 69, passed away Monday, December 21, 2015 at Mercy Hospital surrounded by his loving wife and children. Born on May 7th, 1946, Robert was raised in Mars Hill by Phil and Doris McCrum. He is a graduate of Aroostook Central Institute and attended the University of Maine. He married his high school sweetheart, Jennifer (Craig) McCrum, on June 23, 1966.

  What a good American my doppelganger seemed to be: the vice-president of his company; a member of the National Guard; a devoted son and father; and a faithful husband who, I read, ‘loved traveling with his wife and family’. Every detail of his obituary felt like a not-so-subtle rebuke to another Robert McCrum. According to the Saco Times, my double ‘was a great example of a Christian husband, father and grandfather.’ That was not all; he was fun to be with, too. ‘Robert had a great sense of humor, knew when to listen and when to offer advice. He is survived by his wife of 49 years’. By this point in the obituary, I was hating them both. Besides, their news was too close to home. Was there no respite? As if to ward off evil spirits, I began to doodle an A–Z of ill-health drawn from among friends and associates.

  A has just had a perilous operation to remove her gall bladder; B nearly died from a blood infection associated with routine knee surgery; C is having extensive dental treatment to save her adult teeth; D lately died in agony after a short illness; E has just emerged from a severe nervous breakdown; F is on his deathbed, with cancer of the pancreas; G has endured two years of excruciating bone transplants to repair a shattered leg; H has advanced Parkinson’s; J has just suffered a coup de vieux, ageing ten years in two; K is battling with his father’s Alzheimer’s; L is having chemo; M continues to suffer from multiple sclerosis; N is no longer blind, but still cannot read a computer screen; O suffers from geriatric depression; P has leukaemia; Q dropped dead while carving the Sunday roast; R has incipient dementia; S has his head in a brace, having broken his neck in a bicycle accident; T is drying out in a clinic; U had his heart broken, lost the will to live, and died from a massive coronary;
V is dying of ovarian cancer; W is in a nursing home, having survived an attack of sepsis; X is in a hospice; Y is seeing oncologists; and then there’s Z, aged twenty-five, who is as fit as a fiddle, with not a care in the world. Perhaps Z has the most to worry about.

  Mr Reaper, meanwhile, was not letting up. The following week, in April, it was the turn of Arnold Wesker (eighty-three), Victoria Wood (sixty-two), and Prince (fifty-seven). At the end of that month, the novelist Jenni Diski died from cancer. The other literary deaths of 2016 included Henning Mankell, Harper Lee, and P. D. James.

  As spring turned to summer, the press reported the deaths of the writer and journalist Sally Brampton, the entertainer Caroline Aherne, the film director Michael Cimino, and the poet Geoffrey Hill. All these deaths were described with hardly a reference to their subjects’ last words. This is new: before modern medicine anaesthetized the deathbed, that last exit was often quite conversational. Today, such valedictory dialogues are so exceptional they can become media phenomena.

  The BBC correspondent Steve Hewlett, who died in February 2017 from oesophageal cancer, was a journalist and broadcaster who used a year of fatal illness to extraordinarily moving effect, articulating his struggle in print and on air. Not only did Hewlett write a must-read cancer diary in the Observer, he conducted an unforgettable series of intimate conversations with presenter Eddie Mair on BBC Radio 4.

  ‘Two men talking about cancer’ became essential listening, while Hewlett tackled his diagnosis and subsequent treatment with a journalist’s thoroughness. He demonstrated how to fight illness, never flinched from researching his condition on Google, widening the circle of his enquiry to talk to friends who had been through cancer, investigate the best treatment, and challenge his doctors.