Barry's Blog

"I don't believe in God, but I miss Him." So begins the poignant elegy of Julian Barnes, an atheist turned agnostic, who has decided at the ripe young age of 62 to address his Thanatophobia, his fear of death. His book, "Nothing To Be Frightened Of," was featured this past Sunday on the cover of The New York Times Review of Books. Curiously, the book was reviewed by Garrison Keillor, best known for his long running Prairie Home Companion radio broadcast over National Public Radio. Keillor notes wistfully, "Why should an agnostic fear death who has no faith in an afterlife? How can you be frightened of Nothing? On this simple question Barnes has hung an elegant memoir and meditation, a deep seismic tremor of a book that keeps rumbling and grumbling in the mind for weeks thereafter."

While death, he opines, is nothing to fear, the thought of it is never far from his consciousness. He thinks about it frequently, and is sometimes at night "roared awake" and "pitched from sleep into darkness, panic and a vicious awareness that this is a rented world...awake, alone, untterly alone, beating pillow with fist and shouting 'Oh no Oh No OH NO' in an endless wail."

With little to trust in amidst his fleeting life, Barnes turns to science as a stalwart of hope, but it offers little comfort indeed. Keillor observes of Barnes outlook on life: "We are all dying. Even the sun is dying. Homo sapiens is evolving toward some species that won't care about us whatsoever and our art and literature and scholarship will fall into utter oblivion. Every author will eventually become an unread author. And then humanity will die out and beetles will rule the world. A man can fear his own death but what is he anyway? Simply a mass of neurons. The brain is a lump of meat and the soul is merely something we've talked ourselves into. Individuality is an illusion. Scientists find no physical evidence of 'self' - it is something we've talked ourselves into. We do not produce thoughts, thoughts produce us...Stripped of the Christian narrative, we gaze out on a landscape that, while fascinating, offers nothing that one could call Hope (Barnes refers to 'American hopefulness' with particular disdain.)"

And just as science to Barnes provides little basis for long term human optimism, religious faith is clearly not an attractive option. "I have no faith to lose," he writes. "I was never baptized, never sent to Sunday school. I have never been to a normal church service in my life...I am constantly going into churches, but for architectural reasons; and, more widely, to get a sense of what Englishness once was." To Barnes, the Christian religion has lasted because it is a "beautiful lie, ...with a happy ending."

Yet, he misses the sense of purpose and belief that that he finds in the Mozart Requiem, the paintings of Donatello - "I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm." Nor is Barnes impressed, or comforted, by the contemporary religion that is often so "therapeutic": "The secular modern heaven of self-fulfillment: the development of the personality, the relationships which help define us, the status-giving job...the accumulation of sexual exploits, the visits to the gym, the consumption of culture. It all adds up to happiness, doesn't it - - doesn't it? This is our chosen myth."

Yet for all of Barnes' pessimism about life, and our eminent demise, he still writes winsomely. In Keillor's words, "what gives this book life and keeps the reader happily churning forward is his affection for the people who wander in and out. Barnes tells us he keeps in a drawer his parents' stuff, all of it, their scrapbooks, ration cards, cricket score cards, Christmas card lists, certificates of Perfect Attendance, a photo album of 1913 entitled "Scenes From Highways & Byways," old postcards ("we arrived here safely, and except for the ham sandwiches, we were satisfied with the journey"). Keillor observes, "We may only be units of genetic obedience, but we do love to look at each other...We don't deny the inevitability of our extinction, but we can't help being fond of that postcard."

At the end of Keillor's review, he makes a provocative statement: "I don't know how this book will do in our hopeful country, with the author's bleak face on the cover, but I will say a prayer for retail success. It is a beautiful and funny book, still booming in my head." While few people may be aware of it, Keillor himself comes from a Plymouth Brethren background, a very conservative Christian heritage. And one senses that, though Keillor appreciates the magisterial memoir from the hand of Barnes, that somehow, in stripping the world of its Christian narrative, he has missed the very core of our being, purpose, and existence.

Two Visions. The atheist or agnostic vision, where in the end death brings all things earthly, even the things we cherish most deeply, to utter ruin and annihilation, and the Christian vision, in which this world, in the words of Peter Berger, provide us "signals of transcendence." of Another World to come. Pascal would say to us, both visions can't be true, for life itself is the Ultimate Wager, and we cannot fold the hand we have been dealt. We must choose which vision we believe is true. Despite the brooding darkness that characterizes Barnes' book, he has a lot to teach us, not only about this life, but about the Christian's hope for the next.

Oh yes, one question for reflection. So why aren't many Christians reading books by authors like Julian Barnes, who challenge our thinking about what life is all about, and our hope for a life beyond this present existence?

Just wondering...

"At the present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in."    -C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory