Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Author:Julian Barnes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Autobiography
ISBN: 9780307270252
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2008-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 37

On my sixtieth birthday, I have lunch with T., one of my few religious friends. Or do I just mean faith-professing? Anyway, he is Catholic, wears a cross around his neck and, to the alarm of some past girlfriends, has a crucifix on the wall above his bed. Yes, that does sound more like religious than faith-professing, I know. T. is soon to marry R., who may or may not have the power to remove the crucifix. This being my birthday, I allow myself more interrogatory latitude, so ask why—apart from having been brought up as a Catholic—he believes in his God and his religion. He thinks for a while and replies, “I believe because I want to believe.” Sounding perhaps a little like my brother, I counter with, “If you said to me, ‘I love R. because I want to love R.,’ I wouldn’t be too impressed, and nor would she.” As it is my birthday, T. refrains from throwing his drink over me.

When I return home, I find a small package pushed through the door. My first response is one of mild irritation, as I have specifically requested No Presents, and this particular friend, known for her giftliness, has been warned more than once on the subject. The package contains a lapel badge, battery driven, which flashes “60 TODAY” in blue and red points. What makes it not just acceptable, but the perfect present, turning my irritation into immediate good humour, are the manufacturer’s words printed on the cardboard backing: “WARNING: May Cause Interference With Pacemakers.”

One of the (possibly) “worthwhile short-term worries” that follows my birthday is an American book tour. The arrival into New York—the transit from airport to city—involves passing one of the vastest cemeteries I have ever seen. I always half-enjoy this ritual memento mori, probably because I have never come to love New York. All the bustle in that most ever-bustling and narcissistic of cities will come to this; Manhattan mocked by the packed verticality of the headstones. In the past, I have merely noted the extent of the graveyards and the arithmetic of mortality (a job for the Accountancy God in whom Edmond de Goncourt couldn’t believe). Now, for the first time, something else strikes me: that there is no one in them. These cemeteries are like the modern countryside: hectares of emptiness extending in every direction. And while you hardly expect a yokel with a scythe, a hedger-and-ditcher or a drystone-waller, the utter absence of human activity that agribusiness has brought to the former meadows and pastureland and hedgerowed fields is another kind of death: as if the pesticides have killed off all the farm workers as well. Similarly, in these Queens cemeteries, not a body—not a soul—stirs. Of course, it makes sense: the dead ex-bustlers are unvisited because the city’s new replacement bustlers are much too busy bustling. But if there is anything more melancholy than a graveyard, it is an unvisited graveyard.

A few days later, on the train down to Washington, somewhere south of Trenton, I pass another cemetery.

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