What Goes Into the Grave
What Goes Into the Grave
On celebrity deaths, the virtual reality machine that is imagination, and the foreclosing of certain possibilities.
Thanks to the labyrinthine infinity of YouTube, I can still find unseen snippets of Christopher Hitchens’ innumerable speeches and debates. Some years after I’d devoured the bulk of Hitchens’ output, I found a video of his talk at Hay Festival in 2010, a year before he died.
In the talk, Hitchens confessed that he’d recently been to evensong at a nearby cathedral. He delivered a punchline, and the tinny buzz of audience laughter vibrated through my laptop’s speakers, but I wasn’t laughing. I was poised at that numbing precipice from which one falls into sudden, deep disappointment. I replayed the beginning of Hitchens’ story:
“I had the experience last night, last evening, of going into hear evensong at the cathedral in Hereford.”
I was living in Hereford, in an apartment so close to the cathedral that if I stood on the balcony and tricked myself with perspective, I felt I could reach out and ping the church bells in their tower the way you do with a spotless wineglass. If I’d taken a walk around the neighbourhood on that particular evening and passed the cathedral (as I often did for the same reason Hitchens had visited – “the extraordinary architecture”) I might have met him. I was depressed by the fact of having missed so closely the man who, back then, I deludedly believed I had some connection to through his writing.
I daydreamed about what might have happened if I’d had a chance encounter with Hitchens. I imagined him leaving by the covered walkway at the back of the cathedral, and I pictured him and his wife, Carol Blue, appreciating what was left of the pink in the sky and the warmth of the evening as he lit a post-cloistral cigarette. I would approach him nonchalantly as if I meant to politely pass by, before noticing that oh, it’s you, Mr Hitchens, and I’d stop next to him while keeping my body turned away, as if to suggest that I didn’t mean to keep him long, I also have things to be getting on with, I simply wanted to say...
What would I say? I’d outgrown my naive phase of venerating Hitchens, realising the irony of idolising he who tore down idols. I’d even begun to see through the sophistry he frequently employed, coming to appreciate the wide expanse between deference and disdain. I toyed with ways of saying that I valued him and his work but not too much. What I really wanted was not to convey how much he impressed me but to impress the man myself. So, what could I say, in the few seconds I might have had with him on that spring evening, that would sufficiently demonstrate my own wit and intellect? Nothing, I told myself, and enough of this narcissism. I shut my laptop and went to the other room to tell my wife about how close I’d come to meeting Hitchens.
Hitchens died the year after those remarks at Hay Festival, and with him went the possibility of my ever thanking him for his words, or his reading any of mine. There’s an unflatteringly solipsistic sentiment buried in this, but Hitchens taught me to boldly grasp the nettle of truth, however much it might sting. When a celebrity dies, a large part of our grief is for the loss of hypothetical worlds. A kind of potential goes with them into the grave. A public life is a proposition: this is what the world could be like for you. A beloved icon inspires hypotheticals about what it would be like to have them as your friend or mentor, or what it would be like to live their life.
I was standing in the middle of my local Waterstones when I was unceremoniously told that Martin Amis was dead. At first, I was confused. Nicholson Baker describes his own befuddlement at the news of John Updike’s passing, thinking, “He’s not dead, he’s very much in the middle of things.” Baker believed that Updike – as I thought of Amis – was “in the midst of being a writing person”. What he wanted was what he could no longer have: “evidence of his ongoingness”. I was holding The Rachel Papers in my hand, which is what prompted that person to casually mention the passing of a writer who I was still trying to learn to love. The only Amis book I’d felt truly warm to was Inside Story, his novelisation of his friendship with Hitch. I looked at the shelf in front of me, at the row of the name “Amis” in duplicate attesting to his output, and I thought, So, that’s all there is?
The deaths of Updike and Amis meant the foreclosing of the hypothetical books that might have been written. With Amis, it also meant that he’d never write the book that moved me from stiff-necked assent that the man could write a great sentence to the zeal of a convert. Any hope I had of discovering what I’d been missing out on (in distantly approving of yet never adoring his books) now resided only in those novels he’d left behind and I hadn’t yet read. Then there’s the Gerald Durrell book my aunt bought me for my thirteenth birthday and that I still haven’t read; now that she’s gone, I’ll never be able to read it for the first time and discuss it with her, as I imagined doing when (full of the brash naivety of youth) I imagined I had all the time in the world to do one day.
So, it’s not only celebrities who imply hypothetical realities, it’s everyone we care at all to think about. Isn’t this what so offends us about death? That the potential for seeing that person again, for speaking and arguing with them, hiking and dancing with them, growing and living with them has been transferred from the realm of the one-day-possible to the forever imaginary. This sense of the injustice – the wastefulness – of death plagues us when we consider our own potential being snuffed out by mortality. Hitchens wrote about this in a posthumously published book about his own dying:
“I am badly oppressed by the gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read – if not indeed to write – the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?”
Of course, only the hypothetical realm offers certain life after death: the living continue to talk with the dead, imagining what they might say if they could say anything; we fantasise about what our dearly departed would make of this experience we’ve been left to have without them; we hypothesise about what they would do, as guidance for what we should do. This should allow us to appreciate that these imagined realities hold some value. Christopher Hitchens might be dead, but I can still make use of the virtual reality machine of my imagination to “experience” bumping into him outside of the cathedral near my old home and wondering what I might say to him.
In the end, maybe the only appropriate thing I could have done in that hypothetical meeting would be what Nicholson Baker settled on doing the first time he saw Updike in public. As Updike passed him by, Baker decided to nod. “I would pack in everything I knew about him in my nod, all my memories I had of reading [his work] ... all that knowledge I had of him I would cram into one smiling nod. And that’s what I did.” If only I’d actually been walking by the cathedral that evening so long ago, if only I’d met Hitchens while he happened to be in my neighbourhood, and if only I’d given him such a meaning-laden nod. If only.
Further Reading:
• Mortality, Christopher Hitchens (2012)
• “The Nod”, in The Way the World Works, Nicholson Baker (2012)