is how she expressed her pride in them: “One of my sons writes books I can read but can’t understand, and the other writes books I can understand but can’t read.”
Whenever I used to reflect on our divergent natures, I would often ascribe it to a puerperal detail. After my brother’s birth, our mother had been ill with a streptococcal infection. Unable to breastfeed, she had raised him on whatever bottle-gruel was available in the wartime England of 1942. I knew that my birth, in 1946, had occurred without medical complication, and therefore I must have been breastfed. In moments of sibling competitiveness I would fall back on this essential fact. He was the clever one, all icy intellect and practical action, the shit-retaining tea-bearer; I was the all-rounder, the snuggler, the shit-smearer, the emotional one. He had the brain as he had the British Empire; I had the Rest of the World in all its rich diversity. This was pathetically reductivist, of course, and whenever critics and commentators applied similar reductivism to art (El Greco simplified into a case of astigmatism, Schumann’s music the notation of approaching madness), I would be grossly irritated. But I hugged this explanation to myself at a time when I needed it—a time when observers of my emotional life might have concluded that I wasn’t collecting Rest of the World so much as specializing in rare postmarks of Norway and the Faroe Islands.
Chapter 21
Fear of death replaces fear of God. But fear of God—an entirely sane early principle, given the hazard of life and our vulnerability to thunderbolts of unknown origin—at least allowed for negotiation. We talked God down from being the Vengeful One and rebranded Him the Infinitely Merciful; we changed Him from Old to New, like the Testaments and the Labour Party. We levered up His graven image, put it on runners, and dragged it to a place where the weather was sunnier. We can’t do the same with death. Death can’t be talked down, or parlayed into anything; it simply declines to come to the negotiating table. It doesn’t have to pretend to be Vengeful or Merciful, or even Infinitely Merciless. It is impervious to insult, complaint, or condescension. “Death is not an artist”: no, and would never claim to be one. Artists are unreliable; whereas death never lets you down, remains on call seven days a week, and is happy to work three consecutive eight-hour shifts. You would buy shares in death, if they were available; you would bet on it, however poor the odds. When my brother and I were growing up, there was a minor celebrity called Dr. Barbara Moore, a long-distance walker and propagandizing vegetarian who thought she could outface nature; she once told a newspaper, a little ambitiously, that she would have a baby at 100 and live to be 150. She didn’t get even halfway there. She died at seventy-three, and not at the hands of an anxious book-maker either. Oddly, she did death’s work for it, starving herself into extinction. That was a fine day on the exchange for death.
Atheists in morally superior Category One (no God, no fear of death) like to tell us that the lack of a deity should not in any way diminish our sense of wonder at the universe. It may have all seemed both miraculous and user-friendly when we imagined God had laid it on especially for us, from the harmony of the snowflake and the complex allusiveness of the passion flower to the spectacular showmanship of a solar eclipse. But if everything still moves without a Prime Mover, why should it be less wonderful and less beautiful? Why should we be children needing the teacher to show us things, as if God were some superior version of a TV wildlife expert? The Antarctic penguin, for instance, is just as regal and comic, just as graceful and awkward, whether pre-or post-Darwin. Grow up, and let’s examine together the allure of the double helix, the darkling glimmer of deep space, the infinite adjustments of plumage which
Whenever I used to reflect on our divergent natures, I would often ascribe it to a puerperal detail. After my brother’s birth, our mother had been ill with a streptococcal infection. Unable to breastfeed, she had raised him on whatever bottle-gruel was available in the wartime England of 1942. I knew that my birth, in 1946, had occurred without medical complication, and therefore I must have been breastfed. In moments of sibling competitiveness I would fall back on this essential fact. He was the clever one, all icy intellect and practical action, the shit-retaining tea-bearer; I was the all-rounder, the snuggler, the shit-smearer, the emotional one. He had the brain as he had the British Empire; I had the Rest of the World in all its rich diversity. This was pathetically reductivist, of course, and whenever critics and commentators applied similar reductivism to art (El Greco simplified into a case of astigmatism, Schumann’s music the notation of approaching madness), I would be grossly irritated. But I hugged this explanation to myself at a time when I needed it—a time when observers of my emotional life might have concluded that I wasn’t collecting Rest of the World so much as specializing in rare postmarks of Norway and the Faroe Islands.
Chapter 21
Fear of death replaces fear of God. But fear of God—an entirely sane early principle, given the hazard of life and our vulnerability to thunderbolts of unknown origin—at least allowed for negotiation. We talked God down from being the Vengeful One and rebranded Him the Infinitely Merciful; we changed Him from Old to New, like the Testaments and the Labour Party. We levered up His graven image, put it on runners, and dragged it to a place where the weather was sunnier. We can’t do the same with death. Death can’t be talked down, or parlayed into anything; it simply declines to come to the negotiating table. It doesn’t have to pretend to be Vengeful or Merciful, or even Infinitely Merciless. It is impervious to insult, complaint, or condescension. “Death is not an artist”: no, and would never claim to be one. Artists are unreliable; whereas death never lets you down, remains on call seven days a week, and is happy to work three consecutive eight-hour shifts. You would buy shares in death, if they were available; you would bet on it, however poor the odds. When my brother and I were growing up, there was a minor celebrity called Dr. Barbara Moore, a long-distance walker and propagandizing vegetarian who thought she could outface nature; she once told a newspaper, a little ambitiously, that she would have a baby at 100 and live to be 150. She didn’t get even halfway there. She died at seventy-three, and not at the hands of an anxious book-maker either. Oddly, she did death’s work for it, starving herself into extinction. That was a fine day on the exchange for death.
Atheists in morally superior Category One (no God, no fear of death) like to tell us that the lack of a deity should not in any way diminish our sense of wonder at the universe. It may have all seemed both miraculous and user-friendly when we imagined God had laid it on especially for us, from the harmony of the snowflake and the complex allusiveness of the passion flower to the spectacular showmanship of a solar eclipse. But if everything still moves without a Prime Mover, why should it be less wonderful and less beautiful? Why should we be children needing the teacher to show us things, as if God were some superior version of a TV wildlife expert? The Antarctic penguin, for instance, is just as regal and comic, just as graceful and awkward, whether pre-or post-Darwin. Grow up, and let’s examine together the allure of the double helix, the darkling glimmer of deep space, the infinite adjustments of plumage which
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