Waiting for the Last Bus. Richard Holloway

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СКАЧАТЬ solace of things that have gone before:

      Rootless hopes and fruitless desire are there;

      Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind.

      The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.⁵

      I decided to let the past go and turn to what was left of my future. I left Kelham happier than when I arrived. But the day’s surprises weren’t over.

      The great tower of St Mary Magdalene dominated the flat Nottinghamshire landscape. I had been noticing it for most of my life, most recently from the train window on trips between Edinburgh and London. But I had never entered it, never seen what it was like inside. If my compulsive visits to Kelham were over, this was my last chance. So on my way to the station in Newark, I went in to look around and found that skeleton doing his dance of death. It had an interesting effect on me when I saw it. It did not compel me to rush off to confession to purge my conscience of its sin, but it did remind me that I was speeding towards the final curtain. It made me think.

      I had been taught to treat skeletons with respect while I was a curate in 1960s Glasgow by my Rector’s son, a medical student who went on to become a distinguished physician in Africa. He had invited me to a student party and was disappointed when he discovered that one of his fellow medics had borrowed a skeleton from the anatomy lab and laid it in the bath to surprise visitors to the lavatory. I was amused by the prank till he reminded me that the skeleton had once been a pulsing, laughing human being. Someone had once known and loved this object of fun now lying in a bath in a student flat on Byres Road. Skeletons remind us that devouring time will get us all in the end. It has been reckoned that since we appeared on the planet there have been 107 billion human beings, 7 billion of whom are alive today. That means that the skeletons of 100 billion of us have faded into the earth. Occasionally we come across one that has been buried for thousands of years, and we wonder about the life it had, its joys, its sorrows and what it made of the world it found itself in.

      I remember thinking about this when I first saw the famous photograph of human skulls at the Nyamata Genocide Memorial in Rwanda. In 1994, a million Tutsis were massacred by the forces of the Hutu-led government of Rwanda. Taken in 2007, the photograph shows a tray of some of the human skulls recovered from the killing fields, relics of one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century. It is the empty-yet-staring eye sockets that haunt the viewer. Vivid lives cut short; and the knowledge that, one way or another, we’ll all come to this. We’ll end as skeletons or as the ash of skeletons. ‘As I am today, you will be tomorrow.’

      And the process starts well before we die. It wouldn’t be so wrenching if we never aged and didn’t see death coming for us, with or without a machete in its hand. We’d run and laugh and climb mountains and dive into the sea with undiminished energy our whole life long. Then, at an unexpected moment when we were in the middle of our song, we’d be taken by death in the glory of our being — and it would be over in a second. That is not how our dance towards death usually goes. If we live long enough, we become witnesses to our own slow dying and the revelation of the skull beneath the skin. Psalm 90 says:

      The days of our age are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years; yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; so soon passeth it away and we are gone.⁶

      I have reached fourscore years, and though my life is not yet ‘but labour and sorrow’, I am aware that the shutting down of my body has begun. I am well into the last swing of the dance, and I can feel the beat quickening. That’s what has prompted these reflections on being old and facing death.

      I remember when I noticed that coloured patches like stains on old stone had started to appear on my face and body. When you get old, the garbage-disposal mechanisms designed to clear out waste in your skin cells start to break down. Instead of clearing the rubbish away, like lazy bin men they leave it lying around in the street, your skin. And it clots into those yellow-brown patches called ‘lipofuscin’, better known as age spots. A few years ago at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the press team photographed the writers with a special camera that subjected their skin to a ruthless high-definition exposure of every flaw and wrinkle. When my picture went up in Charlotte Square a few days later, it revealed a face blotched and stained with patches of lipofuscin even I hadn’t noticed before. The bin men of my epidermis had obviously gone on permanent strike. That was when I realised that the wind-down of my body was well advanced and there would be more to come. Mind you, for me the process had started in my twenties, when I started going bald.

      Baldness is not a terminal disease, of course, but it is a permanent condition. And I hated it when it started. I fought it in all the usual hopeless ways. I even bought pills advertised in a church magazine. The manufacturers probably thought the readers of Church Illustrated would have a stronger gift of faith than other baldies. Their pitch worked on me. I sent off for the pills. Nowadays the law would require an accurate description of the chemistry of the product that came through my letterbox a few days later, but none of that was required in 1958.

      They looked like little brown Smarties. And like Smarties they were probably made of sugar. I started swallowing one a day. My hair continued to recede. Hopelessly, I flushed the remaining pills down the toilet and started combing what was left on top to the front, trying to look like Marlon Brando as Mark Antony in the movie Julius Caesar that was out at the time. It was a vain response to a disagreeable reality. It may delude the owner for a moment, but the comb-over is an embarrassment that takes no one in. Depressed yet defiant, one day I cropped the whole thing off and that’s what I’ve done ever since. It was an early lesson in accepting things about myself I did not like but could not change. I see now that losing my hair was a good preparation for ageing and death, the skeleton being the ultimate baldy. Maybe I’ve been lucky to have had an early rehearsal.

      My unsuccessful struggle with baldness taught me something about the human condition. Humans are afflicted with a tragic self-consciousness that does not seem to bother the other animals. All animals feel pain, but the one pain that seems to be unique to humans is an awareness of our bodies that is so keen it can lure us into depression and self-hatred. We are not only aware of our own bodies; we are aware of others’ awareness of them. We are conscious of looking at others and being looked at by them. And we wonder what they make of what they see when they see us.

      How did this obsession with our appearance start? Was it there before mirrors and cameras were invented? Would we be bothered by what we looked like if we couldn’t see ourselves as others see us? However it started, our self-image seems to have obsessed us for centuries. The first-century Roman poet Ovid adapted an old Greek myth to explore the subject. Narcissus, the son of a river god and a local nymph, was famous for his beauty. The blind seer Tiresias warned his mother that Narcissus would have a long and happy life only if he never saw himself. Unfortunately, he caught sight of his own reflection in the waters of a spring, fell in love with what he saw and died of unrequited love.

      If an experience has been developed into a myth like that, it is because its theme is universal. It expresses a reality that troubles the human community. This one suggests that we’d be better blind than obsessed with how we look, because it’s a compulsion that can never be fully satisfied or appeased. Freud took the story further and coined the term narcissism for anyone suffering from an overpowering degree of self-esteem, a condition he diagnosed as a form of emotional immaturity. It is captured in the caricature of the egotist, usually a dominant male, who pauses in his narrative of self-glorification only long enough to say to his listener: ‘But enough from me; tell me how you rate my accomplishments?’ Narcissism in both its classic and Freudian forms has become a prevalent disease in late-modern societies obsessed with image and the screen technologies that promote it. It supplies the energy for one of the main enterprises of modern capitalism, the Anti-Ageing and Postponement of Death industry, what we might call the AAPD complex. We spend fortunes delaying death and СКАЧАТЬ