Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes

Author:Julian Barnes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307797797
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-01T10:00:00+00:00

3

Immortality is no learned question.

—KIERKEGAARD

HHOW DO YOU TELL a good life from a bad life, a wasted life? Jean remembered the forewoman at the jade factory in China who was asked how you could tell good jade from bad jade. Through an interpreter, and through a megaphone that didn’t work, came the reply, “You look at it and by looking you tell its qualities.” Nowadays, this answer no longer seemed so evasive.

Jean had often wondered what it would be like to grow old. When she had been in her fifties, and still feeling in her thirties, she heard a talk on the radio by a gerontologist. “Put cotton wool in your ears,” he had said, “and pebbles in your shoes. Pull on rubber gloves. Smear Vaseline over your glasses, and there you have it: instant ageing.”

It was a good test, but it naturally contained a flaw. You never did age instantly; you never did have a sharp memory for comparison. Nor, when she looked back over the last forty of her hundred years, did it seem to be initially, or even mainly, a matter of sensory deprivation. You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people’s eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you. It wasn’t that you couldn’t walk as far as you used to, it was that other people didn’t expect you to; and if they didn’t, then it needed vain obstinacy to persist.

At sixty she had still felt like a young woman; at eighty, she felt like a middle-aged woman who had something a bit wrong with her; at nearly a hundred she no longer bothered to think whether or not she felt younger than she was—there didn’t seem any point. She was relieved not to be bedbound, as she might have been in earlier times; but mostly she took the medical advances of her lifetime for granted. She lived increasingly inside her head, and was content to be there. Memories, there were far too many memories; they raced across her sky like Irish weather. Her feet, with each succeeding year, seemed a little farther away from her hands; she dropped things, stumbled a little, was fearful; but mostly what she noticed was the smirking paradox of old age: how everything seemed to take longer than it used to, but how, despite this, time seemed to go faster.

At eighty-seven, Jean had taken up smoking. Cigarettes had been finally pronounced risk-free, and after dinner she would light one, close her eyes, and suck on some tangy memory from the previous century. Her favourite brand was Numbers, a cigarette which when first introduced had been divided by dotted lines into eighteen mean smoking units. These MSUs were numbered one to eighteen—a benevolent ploy by the manufacturer which was designed to help people know how much of their cigarette they had smoked. After a couple of years, though, in a summer when subjects for computer-lobby had been hard to find, a row took place

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