John Mitchinson - The Book of the Dead

The Marxes were always delighted when Engels knocked on the door of their house in Kentish Town, not least because they lived in constant fear of the bailiffs. The family affectionately called him General or General Staff. As well as bringing money, he loved to entertain the household with ribald songs. Sometimes “Staff” and “the Moor” did duets, each singing one song’s lyrics to another’s tune. In 1868 they played a parlor game where Marx’s daughter Jenny got both men to fill in her “confessions” album. The contrast between them is revealing. Under “Your favorite maxim,” Marx put “nihil humani a me alienum puto” (“I think nothing human is alien to me”), while Engels put “not to have any”; under “Your favorite motto” Marx had “de omnibus dubitandum” (“doubt everything”), while Engels preferred the splendid “Take it easy.”

Marx spent thirty-four years in the Reading Room of the British Museum. After hours, he addressed small political meetings (where his lisp and heavy accent made him a rather underwhelming speaker) and then got drunk on beer at Jack Straw’s Castle on Hampstead Heath, the highest pub in London. Out on the town, he would sign his name in hotel registers as “Mr. Charles Marx, private gentleman of London.” On one occasion, he and his fellow socialists Edgar Bauer and Wilhelm Liebknecht set out to drink a beer in every pub from Oxford Street to the Hampstead Road. There were eighteen pubs on that route; by the end, they were so inebriated that they decided to throw paving stones at gaslights, narrowly escaping arrest. Unsurprisingly, Marx was never granted British citizenship. A police report of 1874 declared that “he is the notorious German agitator, the head of the International Society and an advocate of communistic principles. This man has not been loyal to the King.” More intimately, a Prussian spy who had seen his family life at firsthand concluded: “Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk.”

Engels and Marx conceived their history of capitalism, Das Kapital , in the late 1840s, but the first volume wasn’t completed until 1867, well behind schedule. Marx died before he could finish parts two and three. These had been written with the help of his daughter Eleanor (known as Tussy), who later played an important role in the early British Labor movement, and were completed and published posthumously by Engels. Marx, suffering from a swollen liver, lost his wife in 1881 and his eldest daughter, Jenny, within a year. He died, heartbroken and destitute, only two months later. Only eleven mourners attended his burial at Highgate cemetery, at which Engels delivered the funeral address. Although exasperated at times by Marx’s endless grumbling about his troubles and constant demands for money, Engels was his first and greatest admirer: “I simply cannot understand,” he wrote in 1881, “how anyone can be envious of genius; it’s something so very special that we who have not got it know it to be unattainable right from the start.”

Engels’s short speech to the little knot of people gathered at Highgate Cemetery on that Saturday in 1883 began: “On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think.” It ended: “His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.” He compared Marx to Darwin, saying that just as one discovered “the law of development of organic nature,” so the other discovered “the law of development of human history.” With the benefit of hindsight, surveying the wreckage of communism, it’s tempting to be dismissive. But though Marx the man, with his boils and his beer, the revolutionary who never led a revolution, the historian of capital who couldn’t organize his own finances, is long gone, his analysis is arguably more relevant than ever. Globalization, rapacious corporations, the decline of high culture, the triumph of consumerism—it’s all there in Marx. Almost no one today calls himself a Marxist (as Engels pointed out, neither did Marx), but we have all taken on board his ideas. In a British radio poll in 2005 a shocking number of listeners voted him the nation’s favorite thinker. Perhaps he did not, after all, discover the hidden laws of history, but his work—and his life—show that you can’t make sense of human existence without first understanding its economics.

It’s astonishing to think that the people who gave us electricity, space travel, and communism made no money from their endeavors, but there are plenty of innovators—equally eccentric, equally influential—who did and who still do. Fame and lasting importance are not commodities to be bought and sold, and there is no correlation between money (or the lack of it) and the value of a human life. More money, or better management of money, would not have saved Nelson from a sniper’s bullet. John Dee didn’t seek enlightenment to turn a profit, nor did Tesla conceive of a world network of wireless energy in order to monetize the intellectual property rights.

There is something oddly liberating about those who die with nothing. The French writer André Maurois captures it beautifully:

If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.

Death lies in wait for each of us, the full stop at the end of our story. All our strivings, our achievements, our catastrophes, the struggles with ourselves, our families, and our bodies are suddenly, mysteriously, over. It is the one unavoidable fact of our lives, yet most of us prefer to ignore it. Half the adults in Britain have not even made a will.

One of the oddest things about our attitude to death is that most of us still don’t think it is the end. In the International Social Survey Program completed at the end of the last millennium, almost 80 percent of Americans claimed to believe in life after death. In Britain the figure was 56 percent, and this was the same or higher in most European nations. Quite what form this life will take is unclear—in Ireland and Portugal more people believed in the existence of heaven than in life after death itself, which seems illogical—but despite the best efforts of militant atheists, the afterlife is an idea, however sketchy, that many of us refuse to let go.

This may have less to do with organized religion than the fact that most people, at some point in their lives, undergo a form of inexplicable experience that has traditionally been labeled “spiritual” or “religious.” These altered states, whether induced by drugs or meditation, intense emotional trauma or illness, all point us back to the mystery of consciousness itself. We don’t know where consciousness comes from, how it works, or why it appears to stop. The question of where we go once our bodies cease to function continues to intrigue us. Here are five lives dominated by the question What happens to us when we die?

St. Cuthbert(634–87) is the most famous saint of northern England. As well as having the gift of holy visions, he was a hermit, healer, and bishop of Lindisfarne. Most of what we know about him comes from the Venerable Bede (673–735), a fellow Northumbrian monk and author of the first major work of English history, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731). Bede’s Life and Miracles of St. Cuthbert was written in 721, only thirty-four years after the saint had died. It includes many firsthand accounts by people who had known Cuthbert well. Though studded with improbable mystic occurrences, it has a historical immediacy that the lives of many other medieval saints lack.