Julian Barnes is mortally afraid of dying

Like many writers, he figured if he wrote a book about it, it would make things better.

Didn't work.

At book's end he was just as frightened, if not more so, by the prospect — and that much closer.

Excerpts follow.

From 'Nothing to be Frightened of'


I don't believe in God, but I miss him. That's what I say when the question is put. I asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own. He replied with a single word: "Soppy."


A common response in surveys of religious attitudes is to say something like, "I don't go to church, but I have my own personal idea of God." This kind of statement makes me in turn react like a philosopher. Soppy, I cry. You may have your own personal idea of God, but does God have his own personal idea of you? Because that's what matters.... The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque.


The fury of the resurrected atheist: that would be something worth seeing.


Dawkins [Richard] has expressed the hope that "When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if were a diseased appendix."


I don't see why our cleverness or self-awareness should make things better rather than worse.... We presumably fear death not just for its own sake but because it is useful to us — or useful to our selfish genes, which will not get passed on if we fail to fear death enough...."


In April, 1848, when Flaubert was twenty-six, the literary friend of his youth, Alfred Le Poitteven, died. In a private memorandum which has only just come to light, Flaubert recorded how he looked at this death, and looked at himself looking at it. He kept a vigil over his dead friend for two consecutive nights; he cut a lock of hair for Le Poitteven's young widow; he helped wrap the body in its shroud; he smelt the stink of decomposition. When the undertakers arrived with the coffin, he kissed his friend on the temple. A decade later, he still remembered that moment: "Once you have kissed a corpse on the forehead there always remains something on your lips, a distant bitterness, an aftertaste of the void that nothing will efface."


Lessing described history as putting accidents in order, and a human life strikes me as a reduced version of this: a span of consciousness during which certain things happen, some predictable, others not; where certain patterns repeat themselves, where the operations of chance and what we may as well for the moment call free will interact...."


These different kinds of truthfulness will be fully apparent to the young writer, and their joining together a matter of anxiety. For the older writer, memory and the imagination begin to seem less and less distinguishable. This is not because the imagined world is really much closer to the writer's life than he or she care to admit... but for exactly the opposite reason: that memory itself comes to seem much closer to an act of the imagination than ever before.