Nothing to Be Frightened Of<\/a>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=jescre-20&l=as2&o=1&a=030735699X\")
\n<\/strong><\/em>. <\/p>\nBarnes is a well-known novelist, but this collection of short episodic essays on facing death reflects a lifetime of reading and taking mental notes on death. How does he face death?<\/p>\n
It all begins with the irony, if not cynicism, that opens up this book: \u201cI don\u2019t believe in God, but I miss Him\u201d (3). There\u2019s much here to ponder: the use of capital of respect for God, combined as it is with the opening \u201cI don\u2019t believe in God\u201d and the almost sentimental thought that this nonbeliever somehow misses God. The reader may never quite come to terms with what Barnes means here, but the book does explore this ambiguity with considerable finesse and clear hopelessness.<\/p>\n
His thoughts occur within the triangle of himself, his philosopher brother, and his family of origins \u2014 for whom he is quite willing to divulge things a more discreet person might wish to keep silent. Perhaps it\u2019s his theory of death. Here\u2019s how he puts his own discovery: \u201cAnd if I was happy to be free of Old Nobodaddy [God], I wasn\u2019t blithe about the consequences. No God, no Heaven, no afterlife; so death, however distant, was on the agenda in quite a different way\u201d (20). And yet: \u201cGod might prefer the honest doubter to the sycophantic chancer\u201d \u2014 that is the person who gambles on God (Pacal\u2019s wager). He says it more forcibly: \u201cThis weak-tea version, the weary murmur of a man with a metaphysical headache\u201d (22).<\/p>\n
\nIn his sketch, Barnes sometimes weighs on issues that bedevil the church, like the person who fashions his or her own view of God: \u201cThe notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque. It also doesn\u2019t matter whether God is just or benevolent or even observant \u2014 of which there seems startingly little proof \u2014 only that He exists\u201d (46). Thus, he later speaks of talking God down from being the Vengeful One and made him Infinitely Merciful and says: \u201cwe changed Him from Old to New, like the Testaments and the Labour Party\u201d (70). His view of God is ironic: \u201cGod is the ultimate ironist.\u201d \u201cOur task is to locate the door behind which eternal life is hidden.\u201d And: \u201cThe game thought up by God the ironist is this: to plant immortal longings in an undeserving creature and then observe the consequences\u201d (187). God, he says, sits back \u201cwith a beatific smile on His face and watches us try to work it out\u201d (188).<\/p>\n
Back to the idea of missing God: \u201cMissing God is focused for me by missing the underlying sense of purpose and belief when confronted with religious art.\u201d Is there any \u201cmeaning\u201d to life apart from belief in God? Not for Barnes. Why? Because \u201cevolution carries out its purposeless purpose\u201d (220). And he goes further, providing us all with one of his more eloquent unbeliefs: Missing God \u201cis one of the haunting hypotheticals for the nonbeliever: what would it be like,\u201d he now asks, \u201cif it were true\u201d? His answer: \u201cIt would \u2014 to put it mildly \u2014 add a bit of extra oomph, wouldn\u2019t it?\u201d (54). He says that if there is an eternity, to which present life is a warm-up or preparation, \u201cthen it [present life] becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious\u201d (60). The recent de-emphasis on heaven knows the first point but at times seems oblivious to the second \u2014 and Barnes knows whereof he is speaking here.<\/p>\n
Here is a his sketch of the four options: those who do not fear death because of faith, those who do not fear death but who have no faith, and those who have faith yet remain quite fearful of death. Barnes says this of himself: \u201cAnd then, out of the medals, below the salt, up shit creek, come those of us who fear death and have no faith\u201d (62).<\/p>\n
Perhaps this tells us his faith: \u201creligions were the first great invention of the fiction writers\u201d (78). As he will say on p. 185, \u201cLessing described history as putting accidents in order, and a human life strikes me as a reduced version of this.\u201d There is no light in the tunnel or at its end: \u201cAnd so it is with our lives: one damn thing after another \u2014 a gutter replaced, a washing machine fixed \u2014 rather than a story\u201d (185).\u00a0 Barnes has \u201cterminal curiosity\u201d (110), but he has no answers \u2014 he has thoughts, and reflections, and insights but positively no answer. His point about fiction, better yet the stories we so deeply love, need to be seen as the human articulation of the depth of reality. Here is his story: \u201cWe live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten\u201d (213).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I hope the title to this post didn\u2019t scare you off because I want to address a serious topic: how we face death. But we can address this from a variety of angles \u2014 like Christian hope or the medical, physical dimensions of death \u2014 and I\u2019d like to look at it from the angle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[476,1774],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-problems-for-faith"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/span>I hope the title to this post didn\u2019t scare you off because I want to address a serious topic: how we face death. But we can address this from a variety of angles \u2014 like Christian hope or the medical, physical dimensions of death \u2014 and I\u2019d like to look at it from the angle of an atheist. That atheist, if that is the right word, is Julian Barnes and his new book, Nothing to Be Frightened Of<\/a>