didn’t go much on that. There was immortality through one’s children; but looking at how we represented our own parents, we couldn’t be sanguine about our own chances of surrogate survival whenit came to our turn. Mostly, in our sneaky, whining dreams of immortality, we concentrated on art.
Tout passe. – L’art robuste
Seul a l’éternité .
It was all laid out for us there, in the last poem of Emaux et Camées . Gautier was a comforting sort of hero. There was no messing with him. He looked tough as well – like a grizzled prop-forward; he’d had lots of women, too. And he said things in ways we could follow without notes.
Les dieux eux-mêmes meurent .
Mais les vers souverains
Demeurent
Plus forts que les airains .
Belief in art was initially an effective simple against the routine ache of Big D. But then someone communicated to me the concept of planet death. You might be able to get used to the idea of personal extinction if you thought the world went on for ever, with generations of kids sitting back in amazement as your works chattered through on computer printout, and murmuring a mutated ‘Stone me’. But when someone in the Science sixth pointed out to me over lunch that the earth was floating inexorably towards a last burn-up, it gave a new look to the robustness of art. LPs syruping; sets of Dickens flaring up at Fahrenheit 451; Donatellos melting like Dali watches. Get out of that one.
Or get out of this one. Suppose, just suppose that someone came up with a cure for death. It wouldn’t necessarily be any more improbable than the splitting of the atom or the discovery of radio waves. But it would be a long process, like finding a cure for cancer. And they aren’t exactly hurrying along with it at the moment. So you can be pretty sure that if ever they do find a way of delaying death, it’ll be just a bit too late for you …
Or get out of this one. Suppose they find a way, even after you are dead, of reconstituting you. What if they dig up yourcoffin and find you’re just a bit too putrefied … What if you’ve been cremated and they can’t find all the grains … What if the State Revivification Committee decides you’re not important enough … What if you’re in the middle of being brought back to life when some dumb nurse, overcome by the significance of her task, drops a vital phial, and your clearing vision hazes over eternally … What if …
Once, foolishly, I asked my brother if he were frightened of death.
‘Bit early, isn’t it?’ He was practical, logical, short-sighted. He was also eighteen and about to go to Leeds University to read economics.
‘But don’t you ever worry about it? Try and work out what it’s all about?’
‘It’s quite obvious what it’s all about, isn’t it? Kaput, finito, curtains.’ He drew a flattened hand across his throat. ‘Anyway, I’m more interested in studying la petite mort at the moment.’ He grinned, knowing that I wouldn’t understand, even though I was meant to be the linguist in the family. I didn’t.
I must, however, have jumped at his gesture, because he then drew out of me with a show of sympathy all my personal and cosmic fears. Strangely, they meant nothing to him, even though his entire reading consisted of SF, and he daily absorbed stories about extended life, reincarnation, transubstantiation and the like. My own delicate and appalled imagination couldn’t cope with such stuff, neither with the prose nor the ideas. Nigel either had a less touchy imagination, or he had a firmer, less anguished grasp of the termination of his own existence. He seemed to treat the whole of life as a sort of transaction, a deal. It was, he would maintain, a taxi-ride which was good fun, but had to be paid for eventually; a game which would prove pointless without a final whistle; a fruit which, once come to ripeness, had fulfilled its function and must, of necessity, fall from the tree. Easeful, deceptive
Tout passe. – L’art robuste
Seul a l’éternité .
It was all laid out for us there, in the last poem of Emaux et Camées . Gautier was a comforting sort of hero. There was no messing with him. He looked tough as well – like a grizzled prop-forward; he’d had lots of women, too. And he said things in ways we could follow without notes.
Les dieux eux-mêmes meurent .
Mais les vers souverains
Demeurent
Plus forts que les airains .
Belief in art was initially an effective simple against the routine ache of Big D. But then someone communicated to me the concept of planet death. You might be able to get used to the idea of personal extinction if you thought the world went on for ever, with generations of kids sitting back in amazement as your works chattered through on computer printout, and murmuring a mutated ‘Stone me’. But when someone in the Science sixth pointed out to me over lunch that the earth was floating inexorably towards a last burn-up, it gave a new look to the robustness of art. LPs syruping; sets of Dickens flaring up at Fahrenheit 451; Donatellos melting like Dali watches. Get out of that one.
Or get out of this one. Suppose, just suppose that someone came up with a cure for death. It wouldn’t necessarily be any more improbable than the splitting of the atom or the discovery of radio waves. But it would be a long process, like finding a cure for cancer. And they aren’t exactly hurrying along with it at the moment. So you can be pretty sure that if ever they do find a way of delaying death, it’ll be just a bit too late for you …
Or get out of this one. Suppose they find a way, even after you are dead, of reconstituting you. What if they dig up yourcoffin and find you’re just a bit too putrefied … What if you’ve been cremated and they can’t find all the grains … What if the State Revivification Committee decides you’re not important enough … What if you’re in the middle of being brought back to life when some dumb nurse, overcome by the significance of her task, drops a vital phial, and your clearing vision hazes over eternally … What if …
Once, foolishly, I asked my brother if he were frightened of death.
‘Bit early, isn’t it?’ He was practical, logical, short-sighted. He was also eighteen and about to go to Leeds University to read economics.
‘But don’t you ever worry about it? Try and work out what it’s all about?’
‘It’s quite obvious what it’s all about, isn’t it? Kaput, finito, curtains.’ He drew a flattened hand across his throat. ‘Anyway, I’m more interested in studying la petite mort at the moment.’ He grinned, knowing that I wouldn’t understand, even though I was meant to be the linguist in the family. I didn’t.
I must, however, have jumped at his gesture, because he then drew out of me with a show of sympathy all my personal and cosmic fears. Strangely, they meant nothing to him, even though his entire reading consisted of SF, and he daily absorbed stories about extended life, reincarnation, transubstantiation and the like. My own delicate and appalled imagination couldn’t cope with such stuff, neither with the prose nor the ideas. Nigel either had a less touchy imagination, or he had a firmer, less anguished grasp of the termination of his own existence. He seemed to treat the whole of life as a sort of transaction, a deal. It was, he would maintain, a taxi-ride which was good fun, but had to be paid for eventually; a game which would prove pointless without a final whistle; a fruit which, once come to ripeness, had fulfilled its function and must, of necessity, fall from the tree. Easeful, deceptive
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