Dear Reader,

Every birthday is a reminder that one is getting closer to death. And not just our own deaths. As we get older, we remember the birthdays that came before, and the people associated with them who might not be with us anymore—either because they are dead or because we have left them behind in life’s journey.

On my birthday this year, I woke up to a procession of shadows—my grandparents, parents, pets, a mentor-professor—the dear departed who had made previous birthdays special, or especially cringe.

My grandmother’s embarrassing insistence that a diya for longevity be lit at lunchtime for the birthday girl (the oil lamp spluttered and went out the moment the fan was switched on—so much for long life); my father giving me the odd twin gifts of a chiffony pink dress and a Leo Mattel rifle on my seventh birthday; my childhood friend, who was asthmatic, snuffing out all the candles on my birthday cake with one excited huff before I could even inhale; in my adult years, my mother calling me up to tell me that bhagwan will look after me despite my lack of regard for both deva (gods) and dwij (Brahmin)—all this came back like snippets from a black comedy.

Did they really happen this way? Why do I remember these incidents when the surrounding events have blurred? The brain is a curious archivist, choosing to preserve random images that take its fancy without bothering to consult me on the curation. Given that it lives off me, it is singularly insubordinate, I would say.

“Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it,” said Montaigne, giving us an idea of the principles by which the rascally brain works. Montaigne is also an expert on the topic with which we began the newsletter—death. He said loftily that to study philosophy is to learn to die. He held hoi polloi in contempt for choosing to ignore death in order to make life easy and pleasurable. Death manages to take us aback since we spend a lifetime ignoring its presence.

The remedy he suggested was to look death in the eye, acknowledge its supreme power over our lives, and toughen up. He wrote:

“[L]et us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness; let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions, represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, ‘Well, and what if it had been death itself?’ and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves... Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve.”

Montaigne is a party pooper, alright (we will be dismissed as overthinkers if every pinprick triggers a meditation on death), but there is meat in what he says. And I agree with him wholeheartedly. It is indeed liberating to ponder death: it puts things in perspective, erases vanity, and fortifies us with a bleak hope by reminding us that everything, both bad and good, passes eventually.

Self-confessedly, British author Julian Barnes had been thinking about death from the time he started thinking—not as a chastening memento mori exercise as prescribed by Montaigne, but as an essential condition of being alive. His 2008 book, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, is about dying, death, memory, forgetting, and related topics like religious belief, atheism, music, art, literature, literary figures—the list is long. A slim book of 250 pages, it packs a wallop. Sample this, on religion and art (Flaubert is involved repeatedly in all of Barnes, and understandably. Flaubert observed that “no sooner do we come into this world than bits of us start to fall off”):

“‘The religion of art’: when Flaubert used the expression, he was talking about the dedicated practice, not the snobbish worship, of art; the monkishness required, the hair shirt, and the silent, solitary meditation before the act. If art is to be compared to a religion, it’s certainly not one in the traditional Catholic mode, with papal authoritarianism above and obedient servitude below. Rather, it is something like the early Church: fertile, chaotic, and schismatic. For every bishop there is a blasphemer; for every dogma there is a heretic. In art now, as in religion then, false prophets and false gods abound. There are artistic priesthoods... which seek to exclude the unwashed, which disappear into hermetic intellectualism and inaccessible refinement. On the other side... there is inauthenticity, mercantilism, and an infantile populism; artists who flatter and compromise, who dodge for votes (and cash) like politicians. Pure or impure, high-minded or corrupt, all—like golden lads and girls and chimneysweepers—will come to dust, and their art not long afterwards, if not before. But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.”

Here Barnes writes about death:

“I find this in my diary, written twenty and more years ago:

People say of death, ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of.’ They say it quickly, casually. Now let’s say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. ‘There’s NOTHING to be frightened of.’

Jules Renard: ‘The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is the word 'nothing.'"

Touché, we say.

Nothing to Be Frightened Of is not the first Barnes book given to death. It is an underlying theme in nearly all his works—fiction and non-fiction—which has become more overt with advancing years and the passing of loved ones. His first wife, Pat Kavanagh, died of a brain tumour a few months after Nothing to Be Frightened Of was published. Barnes’ next non-fiction work was the memoir Levels of Life (2013), where he explores the disorienting effects of grief through the amateurish flying feats of the early 20th-century French balloonist Félix Nadar.

In between came the Booker-winning novel The Sense of an Ending (2011), which again wrestles (is that too physical a verb to be applied to Barnes’ fine, idea-laden writing?) with death, as suggested by the title. Barnes’ works are strewn with figures who die by suicide: in The Sense of an Ending, Adrian takes his own life, leaving a note which says that, because life is given without permission, a free person has a “philosophical duty to examine the nature of their life and may then choose to renounce it”.

Thankfully, not all endings are final. Life, like cinema and literature, is full of false endings, where it seems to conclude only to restart. This is what has been happening in Barnes’ works too—he (or his narrators) seems to bid goodbye and then comes back to tell us more about mortality and incompleteness.

Barnes has declared that his latest publication, Departure(s)—released to coincide with his 80th birthday—“will be my last book”. The narrator—a man in his mid-70s—is also called Julian, but is he the author we know? Poised between memoir and autofiction, Departure(s) is preoccupied with remembering, ageing, and physical decline. Bhavya Dore writes in her review: “The sense of an ending—of both a career and a life—looms large, starting with the book’s title itself. Stories of dead friends and family members dot the pages. When Barnes’ cancer diagnosis arrives, he sees it not as a death sentence, but as a ‘life sentence: sentenced to live with my cancer until I died.’”

“My cancer”—as though cancer is his latest partner. Read the review here.

Barnes is one of the last remaining members of that almost extinct breed—the straight white male writer. With his finely tuned language, his erudition, and his willingness to tackle unfashionable subjects (like death) head-on in fiction, he evokes nostalgia for an older mode of writing. His novels are a reminder and an assurance—that fiction can be serious without being preachy.

We hope that Departure(s) isn’t his curtain call: that the writer-magician breaking his wand before his audience will return again soon for an encore.

I will definitely come back in a fortnight’s time.

Till then,

Anusua Mukherjee

Deputy Editor, Frontline