Waiting for the Last Bus by Richard Holloway, Canongate, £15.99
Richard Holloway was Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church. For many he was an inspiring preacher and caring pastor; for some a disturbing questioner and tiresome show-off. Gradually his faith in the certainties of organised religion, even of Christianity, ebbed away. He resigned from his see and became a more prominent public figure, a media darling, for he always had something interesting and challenging to say. If he had left orthodox committed members of his church behind, his willingness to express honest doubt and to dwell in that only certainty which is uncertainty brought comfort to many searching for some sort of post-Christian meaning.
He has never been a scolding sceptic, for he retained a reverence for the poetry of religion and the solace that faith could offer even the unfaithful. So he has remained a long way distant from vulgar or conceited Dawkins-style atheism.
Now, half-way through his ninth decade, he is “waiting for the last bus”, no longer with a dog at heel, for his last one died and he is too old to take responsibility for another. This is how things fall away as the grave beckons, and this leads us to his subtitle “Reflections on Life and Death”.
Almost 60 years ago, Muriel Spark wrote a novel about old people who are plagued by a telephone caller who says only “Remember you must die”. For some the message is frightening or sinister; others recognise it as good advice that we should all heed. Holloway certainly belongs to the second camp. Death is the one sure thing we have to look forward to.
Though he knows that death is often painful, humiliating and frightening, he holds that it is important to make a good death. Important for whom? For family and friends, certainly. A peaceful departure in which the moment of passing seems to be welcomed is easier to bear than an angry or fearful one. Holloway suggests that, contrary to what Dylan Thomas asked of his father, we should go gentle into that good night. So we should help each other to die at peace, even contented. Martin Amis movingly records in his memoir Experience how, when his father Kingsley was dying, his mind wandering, even tormented, his mother Hilly, Kingsley’s first wife, calmed him by saying tenderly, “Go to sleep. You’ve done your work.”
One has attended funerals – I recall one in the London Oratory – where the certainty of immortality was pervasive and inspiring enough for the moment to still doubts. Yet even those who do not question the truth of Christianity may fear death, even though they have been faithful and lived good lives in the eyes of others. Dr Johnson was one such. Terrified of dying himself, he reportedly refused to believe Adam Smith’s account of the serene passing of the philosopher David Hume, popularly considered an atheist, though more accurately a deist, and roundly told Smith he was a liar. The author of A Theory of Moral Sentiments replied: “You, sir, are a son of a bitch.”
Hume’s position would have been that knowing Nothing before he was, why should he fear Nothing when he was not? This is philosophically reasonable. Nevertheless, which of us has not been brought up sharp by Claudio’s response to being condemned to death in Measure for Measure: “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where, / To lie in cold obstruction and to rot”? These, for me, are the most chilling lines in Shakespeare, and I am a little surprised that Holloway, who quotes from him admirably and copiously, ignores them.
This isn’t a self-help book, though some readers may choose to take it as such, and may indeed find what they seek. Indeed – I find another concessive clause is needed – although it is addressed to each and every one of us who has ever pondered the mystery of experience (whether that be extinction or the passage to another and perhaps fuller life), it becomes clearer as you read that it is a sort of summing-up of Richard Holloway’s journey towards the departure lounge; it is his own self to be helped, a cramming for the exam entitled ars moriendi – the art of dying.
Whether the author, or any of us, will be conscious of anything after the moment when our eyes are closed for the last time is unknowable, no matter how firm the faith. Ghosts or restless spirits may give us a hint if they are not in fact reflections of our own fear. There is one sure survival: the memories we leave to others who may still speak of us, remember our jokes and laugh at our absurdities. But over the years such memories fade and wither.
Death, where is thy sting? Grave, thy victory? Holloway, without a sure answer, nevertheless turns to the Requiem Mass for the Faithful Departed, and “the great choral sequence, Dies Irae” which “can send a shiver down our spines. Even if we do not believe in the doom the great hymn fears, there is something about death itself that summons us to consider the heedlessness of our own lives.” One may agree.
The prospect of death is – like Guinness – good for you. So, I should say, is this book.
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