Ours is but a 'Rented World'
Ours is but a ‘Rented World’
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ShareIf by now you haven’t gathered the fact, Barnes is, even for the death-obsessed, an unusually fixated person, though (at least in this lively and intelligent book) rarely a gloomy one. It’s an interesting combination, at least over the course of this volume’s 244 pages, though there are moments, here and there, when Barnes’ obsession edges close to that of a buttonholing bore. It’s certainly not enough to make you not want to read this book, but just enough to make you hope he’ll turn to a different subject in his next one.
As to my own feelings about death, my alarm is still set on ‘snooze’ mode. I actually used to fear sudden death quite a bit when I was in my 20s, and hadn’t yet packed in a lot of living. Now, having had my share of wonderful and painful experiences, I’m a bit more relaxed about it all, or maybe not so much relaxed as resigned. If something is inevitable, after all, we’ll inevitably recognize it as such, so why hurry that recognition along?
My own glimmering of irrevocable understanding—not enough to cause me to sit bolt upright with alarm, but enough to make me to stir a bit—happened to me recently when I attended my high school’s 50th birthday celebration. The event was held to raise money for a scholarship fund, and unlike standard class reunions, this event was open to former students from the first graduating class in 1969 all the way through this past year.
When I first arrived, I saw a bulletin board displaying scores of old black-and-white class pictures from the six or seven grammar schools that fed into my high school, and was a bit surprised to see that the very first picture I looked at was of my own third grade class—there I was, in a well-remembered shirt, in the back row, with the other tall and gangly ones. But I quickly saw that this was a misperception—it was another class, and another third-grader, from another grammar school entirely. I looked at a different class picture and, again, I initially perceived it as mine before discovering on closer inspection that it was not.
The problem was three-fold (there’s nothing wrong with my vision.) First, class pictures from a given era all tend to blend together because the photographers pose everyone in identical three-quarter-view stances, and with the same up-tilted shiny faces. Second, boys’ fashions of my era tended to make everything a roughly textured corduroy and flannel blur. And third—and most important –- we were still close enough to our blobby embryonic beginnings that, whatever the distinctive differences in our physiognomies, we hadn’t yet diverged enough, or had enough experiences imprinted on our faces and our brains, to avoid being largely indistinguishable from countless others of our age.
Beginning in the latter years of grammar school, and certainly by the time we all graduated from high school, those superficial resemblances began to disappear. By the time I attended my 10th and 20th high school reunions, everyone looked so different from each other, and had had such radically different life experiences, that the divergence appeared complete and permanent.
But suddenly, at my high school’s birthday celebration, I began to notice once again how similar those in my age group all looked. Maybe it was something about the air we all breathed back then, and the water (or, more likely, pop) we all drank, but with few exceptions, we had re-formed again into a similar-looking, somewhat pale and jowly but oddly baby-faced mass. (For reasons I do not understand, many of the people from my neck of the woods, regardless of their ethnicity, tend to retain a baby-fat chubbiness in the cheeks, even as the manifestations of aging otherwise encroach.) If I took off my glasses, the effect was magnified, and we were once again, as we had been back in third grade, an undifferentiated blob.
Soon enough, we would all be exactly that: Blobs of mortal flesh, sharing one all-consuming commonality, which is to say our rapidly approaching demise. We’d all started out in the same neighborhood, and mostly went our separate ways, and now we were all, helplessly and inevitably, being drawn back whence we came.
If this revelation of mine seems beyond-obvious, well, of course it is, but it probably wouldn’t be possible to live our lives if we stared the obvious in the face every day. Even Barnes, who says in this book that the fear of death is “the most rational thing in the world”, must be able to forget about his impending demise from time to time in order to, well, live.
Enjoying a good lunch is much easier if one ignores the gaping grave while slicing into a steak, and sex—well, I don’t know if it’s even possible to pull that off while dwelling on death. More broadly, enjoying a good life is so much easier if one chooses not to face the awful facts until relatively late in life (while not neglecting in the interim to pop those fish oil capsules and buckle those seat belts.) Denying—or at the very least suppressing—the certainty of death also can be a rational act, at least until that time when it is not.
The evening I spent with my fellow doomed classmates didn’t make me melancholy; if anything, I felt somehow comforted by the reminder that my childhood friends and I, and everyone else on earth, are all going to share an indistinguishable fate. (Imagine a society where, in fact, 20 percent of us could choose immortality, and the envy and ire that would evoke in the rest of us.) On the scale of death-denial from William Saroyan to Julian Barnes, I tend to be much closer to the former, but though I do not at the moment have death on my agenda, I cannot deny that Death’s agenda includes me.
