Out Into the Beautiful World by Theodore Dalrymple

Author:Theodore Dalrymple
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781943003020
Publisher: New English Review Press
Published: 2015-08-01T22:00:00+00:00

20

And Death Shall Have His Dominion

THERE ARE many ways of dividing humanity into two other than those who divide humanity into two and those who don’t. For example, there are those who are attracted to cemeteries and those who are repelled by them. I am of the former moiety: cemeteries are for me like bookshops; I find it difficult to resist the temptation to enter them and linger awhile.

I have been like this ever since my adolescence and I do not think I am morbid. On the contrary, I find it strange that some hurry past cemeteries either without a second look or even with a shudder. Meditation on the transience of life, intermittent rather than continuous and rejuvenating rather than paralysing, is important for achieving equanimity. And there is no better aid to such meditation, I find, than a good graveyard.

When I am in Paris I stay within a stone’s throw of Père-Lachaise, perhaps the most famous cemetery in the world. Certainly it has more very celebrated people buried in it than any other cemetery that I know: you turn a corner and there is Balzac, with Delacroix not very far away. Most visitors go in search of the buried eminent, and indeed I have a guide that will take you straight to them, though I never use it. I prefer the tombs of the never-heard-of, but also of the once-heard-of-but-now-forgotten. They seem to me a greater stimulus to the imagination than the tombs of those everyone has heard of; and it seems almost a cliché to make straight for Oscar Wilde, as so many visitors do, who is perhaps the most famous inhabitant of the cemetery. The fact is that Sir Jacob Epstein’s tomb is an aesthetic abomination, his most famous and at the same time his worst work. My guide, which is French, delights to point out that an Englishwoman, outraged by the sight of the carved figure’s genitals, destroyed them with a hammer, thus confirming the French view of the English as a nation of hypocritical and unsophisticated prudes and puritans. The tomb is now protected by screens of what looks like bullet-proof glass, a case of closing the stable door after (if I may be allowed a mixed metaphor) the prude has hammered. It, the glass, is smothered in the red lipstick of those who have kissed it, and the last time I walked past someone had managed to insinuate one of those shiny plastic Chinese teddy-bears with a mechanical waving arm (in this case the battery had run out and the arm waved no longer), of the kind that one sometimes finds at the entrance to cheaper Chinese restaurants, into the space between the tomb and its protective glass. This led me to the melancholy reflection that prudes are probably preferable to sentimentalists, though perhaps not by a wide margin.

I prefer to wander at random among the 65,000 graves than seek out anyone in particular. When I was a child, the advertising slogan of

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