There's nothing to be frightened of.  A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that I was re-reading Julian Barnes's memoir, Nothing to Be Frightened Of.  It was the first book I had read on my Kindle, chosen because I like Barnes and find his writing witty and graceful.  But I was disappointed in the book.  I had read it, however, before I was diagnosed with cancer, and I wondered whether I would find it more powerful now.  The book is usually classified as a memoir, and the first chapters are indeed autobiographical (though not in a straightforward way), but it becomes a series of meditations on death, religion (or lack thereof), and memory.

The title seems at first reassuring: death is nothing to be frightened of.  But it has another resonance: what do we have to be frightened of?  Nothing(ness).  And for Barnes, it's the second, less obvious, meaning that haunts his thoughts.  He's a great classifier.  There are those who are afraid of death, but not of dying (Barnes himself); those who are afraid of dying, but not death (Barnes's brother, a philosopher, who is a foil for many of the arguments in the book).  I'm with his brother, but I do wonder what happened to two other groups: those who are afraid of both dying and death (a large group, I'd guess) and those who are afraid of neither.  Barnes is much concerned with le reveil mortel, that moment when we become aware of our finitude.  And he's quite competitive about that awareness, envying those for whom it has come earlier  or more dramatically than for him.  With all the literary references in the book, Barnes omits Dickinson, a poet who describes over and over again that moment, most famously in the poem that begins "Because I could not stop for death" and concludes with "Since then -- 'tis Centuries -- and yet / Feels shorter than the Day / I first surmised the Horses' Heads / Were toward Eternity --."

The book opens with this assertion: "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him."  When he asks his brother what he thinks about this formulation, the brother replies, "Soppy."  (I'm with the brother.)  Another of Barnes's classifications is a strange happiness hierarchy: 1.  Those who don't believe in God and don't fear death.  2.  Those who believe in God and don't fear death. 3.  Those who believe in God and hence fear (and desire) death.  4.  Those who don't believe in God and fear death.  Given Barnes's agnostic nostalgia for God, I'd think he could make a British-ish version of Pascal's wager and surrender his agnosticism in order to move up a notch.

The chief influence on Barnes's book is explicitly the French writer Jules Renard, whose life and the deaths associated with it are recounted and speculated about and whose ideas are both echoed and countered.  Before Renard, it's Montaigne's Essais that, in both their ideas and their tentative structure, influence the (for me) frustrating recursiveness of Barnes's work.  Among English writers, it's Somerset Maugham (who was himself influenced by Renard) and Philip Larkin who are most often cited.  Two quotes from Renard: "It's when facing death that we become most bookish" and "I don't know whether God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't."  What Barnes lacks in this anxious memoir is the acerbic edge of that last quotation.  There are many fascinating anecdotes and pithy, "bookish" allusions.  But the book is finally more worried essays, attempts, than cohesive whole.