Charles Snow - Last Things

What was I frightened of?

Death? Death is nothing. Literally nothing. I ought to know that by now.

Dying? Nothing was easier than dying. Not always maybe. But if it happened as it had that morning, nothing was easier. If I went out now, it would be as easy.

What was I frightened of?

Not that night, but afterwards, when I was remembering dread, not existing in it, I might have given an answer. At least I knew what didn’t matter, what hadn’t drifted for an instant through my mind. Listening by the side of Austin Davidson’s bed, I had heard him say that what chilled him was to realise that he would never hear the end of any story that had interested him: nor even be present as a spectator, or the most tenuous shadow of a ghost. Yes, he was being honest. But one could feel that at any time in one’s life, thinking about death. Davidson knew he would die soon, but still he wasn’t in the presence of annihilation. If he had been, he would have been lonelier, less lofty, than that. I could answer only for myself: yet there I would have answered for him too. One had no interest left, except in the absolute loneliness. Questions that had once been fascinating – they had no meaning. Politics, the world, what would men think about one’s work: that was a blank. Friends, wife, son, all the future: that was as dead a blank.

Sometimes, in health, as I couldn’t help recalling after a visit to Austin Davidson, I had imagined what dying would be like. You die alone. I thought that I had imagined it as real. Nonsense, I had fooled and flattered myself. It was so much less takable, near to, identical with, the fright of the flesh itself. Had it been like this for my old father? He had asked for his lodger’s company: his lodger held his hand: he must have been quite alone.

What was I frightened of? When I was remembering it, not living it, I might have said, of nothing. Of being nothing. On the one side, there was what I called ‘I’. On the other, there was nothing. That was all. That was what it reduced to. In the abyss between the two was dread.

Yet maybe, when I was remembering, I, like Austin Davidson, made it more delicate than the truth.

Beside the bed, a voice I hadn’t heard before. Without noticing, I had been the other side of the sleep threshold. This was a different nurse, a different voice, they were coming in shifts. Whispered figures, but louder whispers, almost enough to catch. Out of the dark, I recalled the other figures, Mansel’s figures, the only ones that anyone had told me. Three and a half minutes, three and three-quarters. Trying to think. Another of the night’s cold sweats. The grue down the spine. I could have read or heard – or had my memory gone? – that three minutes was enough to damage the brain. The sweat formed at the temples, dripped down. I had to try. What did I remember? My telephone number. Births and deaths of Russian writers – Turgenev 1815–83. Dostoevsky 1821–81. Tolstoy 1828–1910. They came clicking to mind, just as they always did. Poetry. I began the first lines of Paradise Lost , then stuck. That was nothing new, I was calming myself. It was young Charles who had the photographic memory. Characters in Little Dorrit – Clennam, Mrs Finching, Merdle, Casby, Tite Barnacle – they came out quick enough. What about problems? The old proof of the prime-number theorem, that once made me wish I had gone on with mathematics. Yes, I could work through that. There didn’t seem (it was the only reassurance through the night) any damage yet awhile.

The small light in my left eye had gone out. I was in the red-dark. Sometimes, nearer sleep, the tapestries took themselves away and the darkness deepened. The previous time that I had been in that condition, I had thought that blindness would be like this, and I wasn’t sure that I could endure it. Now I wasn’t thinking of blindness. That was a speculation one made when one could afford to, like Davidson’s regret about what he was going to miss. Thoughts became simpler as they narrowed: there wasn’t room for luxury, even the luxury of being anxious. Only one dread was left, the final one.

Fingers at my arm, jolts into half-waking: like a night in the prison cell it went on. Once I asked the time. Someone told me, half past two.

A NURSE was giving me a sponge, waking me, asking if I would like to freshen myself. Mr Mansel was on his way, she said. Then his crisp, light-toned voice.

‘Good morning, sir. I hope you’ve had a good night.’

‘Not exactly, Christopher. Rather like being in a sleeper on the old Lehigh Valley–’

During the night I had had reveries about blaming him, about letting all the fright and anger loose. Yet I found myself replying in his own aseptic fashion.

He said, professionally cheerful: ‘Sorry about that. We thought you might sleep through it.’

‘If they’d have let me alone for one single damned hour, perhaps I could–’

‘That was just a precaution.’ Mansel told me what they had been doing. ‘We wanted to see that everything was working. Which it is.’

‘I suppose that’s some consolation.’ Nevertheless, while he was talking I felt safe.

‘I think it should be, sir. Now let’s have a look at the eye.’ The clever fingers took off the pads, and I blinked into the bright, solid, consoling room. Outside the window, the sky was black, before dawn on a winter morning. If I could stay in the light, perhaps the night would be behind me.

Mansel’s face, smelling of shaving-soap, was only inches away. His eye, magnified by the lens, was searching into mine. After a minute or so, he said: ‘It’s early days yet, of course. I don’t want to raise false hopes, but it may have gone better than last time.’

‘That’s a somewhat minor bonus in the circumstances, don’t you think?’

‘Not at all,’ Mansel answered. ‘We’ve had a bit of unexpected trouble, of course we have. That’s all the more reason why we want to get the eye right at the end of it.’

Quickly, carefully, he put me back into the dark. I wished to say that his professional concern was not shared by me. I had meant to tell him – I had composed the speeches at one stage of the night – that, if I could get out of this hospital alive, it didn’t matter a curse what happened to the eye. We never ought to have risked the operation. A tiny gain if all went well. If all didn’t go well – that I could tell them about as I lay there that night, side strapped up under my heart, nurses keeping watch. I had been against this operation from the first, and he had overruled me. Anger got mixed up with fright, was better than fright, I had meant to project the anger on to Mansel. Yet I did nothing of the sort. The principal of complementarity seemed to work whenever I had an audience, and I behaved like a decent patient. Though once again in the dark, respite over, the night’s thoughts came flooding back.

Mansel’s voice was amiably exhorting me to have a cup of tea and some breakfast. I said, making the most of a minuscule complaint, that it was nearly impossible to eat lying rigid. Mansel was attentive: I was blinded, but perhaps my face still told him something. ‘We may be able to make things easier for you soon,’ he said. Meanwhile people would be coming in shortly to perform another test. In a couple of hours Mansel himself would return, together with a colleague.

What did that mean? I was as suspicious as in the afternoon before. If only they would tell me all the facts – that was what all sophisticated people cried out in their medical crises. Later, I wondered how much one could really take. How much should I have been encouraged if they had let me know each blood-pressure reading all through the night?