Terry Eagleton is not a fan of sloppy thinking, especially when it comes to the granite fact of death. He particularly doesn’t like the attitude of Dylan Thomas who famously urged his ailing father to “not go gentle into that good night”. If the “night” – death – is so “good” then why, asks Eagleton reasonably, would Thomas want his dad to dawdle? Shouldn’t DJ Thomas, rather, be encouraged to trot towards his lovely end like an ecstatic marathon runner on the home straight?
Eagleton’s reproach to Thomas’s doublethink should not be read as panicky denial about the reality of his own mortality. To the contrary, Eagleton, who at 83 admits that he wasn’t sure whether this book would end up being published posthumously, finds it hard to think or write about much else. After a 60-year academic career spent tussling with Marxist literary theory, not to mention the epistemological void at the heart of postmodernism criticism, these days Eagleton is more interested in pondering death and how it “lacks a sense of occasion”. It might visit, for example, while you happen to be dressed in a giraffe outfit.
Not, Eagleton clarifies, that it would really matter being found dead disguised as a long-necked ungulate since you would be beyond all caring. Indeed, this not mattering is, as he sees it, one of the great pleasures of being deceased. You’re beyond the reach of moral and social obligation: you can cheat your creditors, fail to turn up at your mother’s funeral and ignore increasingly hysterical demands to pay a parking fine. There might even be something sexy about being dead, a certain “pornographic pleasure” in decomposition, what Eagleton calls “the erotic bliss of yielding to an impregnable power”. Practically speaking, you’re no longer required to hold it all together.
Until that moment of blessed release, though, we are obliged to trundle on as best we can. Eagleton mildly advocates trying to live each day in the full knowledge that death is just around the corner. Done right, this should in theory release us “from the mortal anxiety that compels us to clutch, seize and despoil”. Instead, we would experience the world around us with the visionary intensity of a William Blake, savouring every raindrop, ray of sunlight and crunch of apple to the point of almost painful lucidity. Lovely in principle, but as Eagleton puts it with a typically bathetic side-swipe, the mental contortion required to attain this state of ecstasy may end up being “more trouble than it’s worth”.
For the fact remains that we are time-trapped creatures, forever casting back to the past and projecting forward to an imagined future, refusing to live in the reality of now. For this reason, our meagre deaths tend to arrive like an unexpected insult, a monstrous unfairness that we weren’t expecting. Eagleton is consoling here about the fact that when death arrives we probably won’t say the right or splendid thing. Thomas’s final words were apparently “the End is in Eden” which, as Eagleton tartly points out, is just one more of the old windbag’s “metaphysical vacuities”.
As far as deathbed utterance goes, better instead to recall Steve Jobs’s less prescriptive “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow”, which doesn’t strain for “sham grandeur” and leaves the listener free to fill in the blank according to their own fantasies. Personally, I’ve always liked to imagine that Jobs was being shown a vision of a heavenly Apple store, with serried ranks of angels in cobalt-coloured T-shirts tip-tapping away on futuristic Macs.
A Death of One’s Own is in no sense an argument about its subject or even a sustained inquiry into death’s terrors and odd consolations. Instead, Eagleton lets his capacious mind, vast reading and wicked wit loose over the whole business of arriving at a full stop. In his introduction he explains that he has included ideas and individuals that have been central to his “spiritual and intellectual life” of the past six decades. Marx, Freud and cradle Catholicism are all invited to troop on stage to take a final bow “before the curtain comes down”. I found that the best way to read this book, which is undeniably dense, is to take in a bit each night before going to sleep, that “little death” from which, God willing, we awake refreshed each morning.
• A Death of One’s Own: Reflections on Mortality by Terry Eagleton is published by Yale (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
