Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
WHAT antidotes are there to the thought of death? One of the most effective I discovered last week by accident. I wrote down my fears and purged myself. True, I infected all my friends, but I became, at least temporarily, immune in the process. Like the bottle imp of RLS, it re- leased me from its thrall as a reward for supplying a new circle of victims. My real desire was clearly to reassure myself that everyone else was in the same boat—or rather, space ship. (It seems to occur to very few of those people whose stomachs turn at the very idea of travelling through emptiness to the Moon or the planets, that solid old Terra is itself a space Cunarder carrying its passengers on an annual cruise round the Sun at some prodigious rate of knots.) The herd instinct is so powerful just because it is so comforting. Most of us are deeply and strongly egalitarian and will put up with any discomfort, hardship or even grave danger so long as we can be persuaded that it is being fairly and equally shared with the rest of the group. Many a life must have been lost in the bombing during the last war because its owner would rather be decapitated upright with his .brave peers than survive grovelling on the floor with inferior cowards. Even at the entrance to the gas chambers, there seemed to linger a conditioning which decreed it would be bad form to take one of the guards to death with you.
If we learned that our Cabinet ministers were being secretly injected with immortality serum, we would at that instant be struck by a tidal Wave of envy and despair, rising up in our wrath to hang them from the railings in Parliament Square. Judge Rutherford of the Jehovah's Wit- nesses dreamed up one of the most attractive religious slogans ever hallelujahed in 'Millions Now Living Will Never Die,' then unfortunately weakened its appeal by dying himself before the millennium. (I have, however, a personal prefer- ence for the sect called the New and Latter House of Israel which was founded by a Sergeant Mus- grave figure under the adopted name of James Jershom Jezreel. He, too, spoiled his case by dying in 1885 before the Messiah had returned to confer immortality on up to 144,000 followers.)
Another antidote is the manipulation of time.
think everybody now admits that the clock is a useful device for helping to keep machines Punctual but that what it measures is rarely ever the same for different people. The thought of Death, like an angry creditor. can be staved off very successfully by dividing and sub-dividing the days and the hours and sometimes, in obses- sive cases, even the minutes into separate Plots, each with its own colour, flavour, sound and meaning. Once it is past, a second is no longer or shorter than a decade. ,tk memory is a memory is a memory. If a hypnotist planted in the brain of an aged beggar the recollections of the lifetime of a king, the beggar would have
been a king. Time can be stretched and slowed by an effort of will. In principle, there is no difference between one man of forty who is told by his doctor that he will in all probability die within a year and another who is told by his reason that in all certainty he will die some time within sixty years. Yet their reactions tend to be completely different. Most of us cannot be brought to accept that a finite number of single years must inevitably add up to a lifetime. It is like Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. We cling to the sophistry that the gap between us and death, like that between the hero and the animal, will grow ever less yet never dis- appear. But it needs no mathematics or logic to show that the moment must come when we will be overhauled in the race. Variety, then, is also a spice against Death.
Birth, too, is a hefty counterweight to Death. To Bacon and Mr. Heath, a wife and children may seem hostages to fortune. And it is true that nothing marks out your route' towards old age so indelibly as a wedge of growing children. Bachelors can get away for much longer believing the small, glossy, flattering image of themselves they see reflected in their own eyeballs. But a family seems one of the few constructive defences against time's erosion. Shakespeare's sonnets live on for him and keep his name alive. But so also would his descendants if they knew who he was.
It is one of the unfair advantages the aristocracy possess over the rest of us that an ancient concern for title to property has kept in print the names of, at least, the official father of each generation.
We commemorate the first Earl of Home by the very numbering of the fourteenth Earl. There is probably little the fourteenth Mr. Wilson can do to honour the resting place of the first Mr. But posthumous fame, honour and respect are just what most of us do not want to be reminded of— we would settle for being unknown. dishonourable and neglected if we could also avoid being post- humous. And children, during your lifetime, provide you with a vicarious double-life. Just to watch my son learning to phrase a sentence brings back to me sections of my on childhood in almost total recall. And if memory of the past can be experienced not only intellectually, but also emotionally, and to some extent physically, then again we are utilising time with optimum efficiency. We can almost be living two parallel lives simultaneously.
Many people die because they do not want to live. After middle age, they find it impossible to think of an ambition which has any hope or possibility of being fulfilled. Perhaps the majority of us. if we were honest, would confess to seeing after fifty or so only a slow decline towards retire- ment. A family provides the best of incentives to survival. It puts you as a bit player at the heart of your own soap opera serial. You cannot bear to leave before seeing the result of the next instal- ment. As a grand-parent, you can play the kind of parent you always wanted to have when you were young and you never dared to become when you were middle-aged. The population explosion may be mankind's instinctive reaction and antidote to the nuclear explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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