several years. Aha—so perhaps he welcomed the approach? Idle, interesting questions, answered at the touch of an e-mail. “As far as I recall, I neither welcomed it nor found it repugnant—merely bizarre. After that on the Metropolitan [line] I used to adopt the geometry homework strategy.”
He certainly sounds more sanguine and practical than I was, when, in the crush of the morning Tube, some brute in a suit jammed his thigh between my legs as if there really was nowhere else to put it. Or when Edwards (as he was not called), an older boy with a pustular complexion, attempted what was more an assault than a seduction in a Southern Region compartment on the way back from rugby. I found it unwelcome and, if not repugnant, certainly alarming, and have always been able to remember the exact words I used when rebuffing his attention. “Don’t get sexy, Edwards,” I said (though it was not Edwards). The words worked, but I remembered them not so much for their effectiveness as because even so they felt not quite right. What he had done—a quick finger-slash at my trousered balls—was not remotely what I considered sexy (which involved breasts, for a start), and I felt my answer had suggested something not really the case.
Chapter 11
At Oxford, I read Montaigne for the first time. He is where our modern thinking about death begins; he is the link between the wise exemplars of the Ancient World and our attempt to find a modern, grown-up, non-religious acceptance of our inevitable end. Philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir. To be a philosopher is to learn how to die. Montaigne is quoting Cicero, who is in turn referring to Socrates. His learned and famous pages on death are stoical, bookish, anecdotal, epigrammatic, and consoling (in purpose, anyway); they are also urgent. As my mother pointed out, people didn’t live half so long in the old days. Forty was doing very well, given pestilence and war, with the doctor as likely to kill as cure. To die from “a draining away of one’s strength caused by extreme old age” was in Montaigne’s day a “rare, singular and extraordinary death.” Nowadays we assume it as our right.
Philippe Ariès observed that when death really began to be feared, it ceased to be talked about. Increased longevity has compounded this: since the matter seems less immediately pressing, it has become morbidly bad manners to raise it. The way we strenuously put off thinking about death reminds me of a long-running advertisement for Pearl Insurance which my brother and I liked to quote to one another. Pensions, like false teeth and chiropodists, were something so far distant as to be largely comical. This was somehow confirmed by the naive line drawings of a man with an increasingly anxious face. At age twenty-five, the face is cheerily complacent: “They tell me the job is not pension-able.” By thirty-five, a little doubt has begun to set in: “Unfortunately, my work does not bear a pension.” And so on—with the word “pension” set each time amid an admonitory oblong of grey—until age sixty-five: “Without a pension I really don’t know what I shall do.” Yes, Montaigne would say, you certainly should have started thinking about death a little earlier.
In his day, the question was constantly in front of you—unless you took the remedy of the common people who, according to Montaigne, pretended that it did not exist. But philosophers, and the mentally curious, looked to history, and to the Ancients, in search of how best to die. Nowadays, our ambitions have grown more puny. “Courage,” Larkin wrote in “Aubade,” his great death-poem, “means not scaring others.” Not back then it didn’t. It meant a great deal more: showing others how to die honourably, wisely, and with constancy.
One of Montaigne’s key instances is the story of Pomponius Atticus, a correspondent of Cicero’s. When Atticus fell ill, and medical attempts to prolong his existence merely prolonged
He certainly sounds more sanguine and practical than I was, when, in the crush of the morning Tube, some brute in a suit jammed his thigh between my legs as if there really was nowhere else to put it. Or when Edwards (as he was not called), an older boy with a pustular complexion, attempted what was more an assault than a seduction in a Southern Region compartment on the way back from rugby. I found it unwelcome and, if not repugnant, certainly alarming, and have always been able to remember the exact words I used when rebuffing his attention. “Don’t get sexy, Edwards,” I said (though it was not Edwards). The words worked, but I remembered them not so much for their effectiveness as because even so they felt not quite right. What he had done—a quick finger-slash at my trousered balls—was not remotely what I considered sexy (which involved breasts, for a start), and I felt my answer had suggested something not really the case.
Chapter 11
At Oxford, I read Montaigne for the first time. He is where our modern thinking about death begins; he is the link between the wise exemplars of the Ancient World and our attempt to find a modern, grown-up, non-religious acceptance of our inevitable end. Philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir. To be a philosopher is to learn how to die. Montaigne is quoting Cicero, who is in turn referring to Socrates. His learned and famous pages on death are stoical, bookish, anecdotal, epigrammatic, and consoling (in purpose, anyway); they are also urgent. As my mother pointed out, people didn’t live half so long in the old days. Forty was doing very well, given pestilence and war, with the doctor as likely to kill as cure. To die from “a draining away of one’s strength caused by extreme old age” was in Montaigne’s day a “rare, singular and extraordinary death.” Nowadays we assume it as our right.
Philippe Ariès observed that when death really began to be feared, it ceased to be talked about. Increased longevity has compounded this: since the matter seems less immediately pressing, it has become morbidly bad manners to raise it. The way we strenuously put off thinking about death reminds me of a long-running advertisement for Pearl Insurance which my brother and I liked to quote to one another. Pensions, like false teeth and chiropodists, were something so far distant as to be largely comical. This was somehow confirmed by the naive line drawings of a man with an increasingly anxious face. At age twenty-five, the face is cheerily complacent: “They tell me the job is not pension-able.” By thirty-five, a little doubt has begun to set in: “Unfortunately, my work does not bear a pension.” And so on—with the word “pension” set each time amid an admonitory oblong of grey—until age sixty-five: “Without a pension I really don’t know what I shall do.” Yes, Montaigne would say, you certainly should have started thinking about death a little earlier.
In his day, the question was constantly in front of you—unless you took the remedy of the common people who, according to Montaigne, pretended that it did not exist. But philosophers, and the mentally curious, looked to history, and to the Ancients, in search of how best to die. Nowadays, our ambitions have grown more puny. “Courage,” Larkin wrote in “Aubade,” his great death-poem, “means not scaring others.” Not back then it didn’t. It meant a great deal more: showing others how to die honourably, wisely, and with constancy.
One of Montaigne’s key instances is the story of Pomponius Atticus, a correspondent of Cicero’s. When Atticus fell ill, and medical attempts to prolong his existence merely prolonged
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