The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [180]
The “end of everything.” This is the adult’s bogeyman, the only ghoul that survives the nursery to rise before us from time to time and give us quaky guts. This is more than the fear of death, for at one’s own demise, one clutches to the condolence that at least something else lives on that represents us or matters to us, somehow preserving us, if only it is the knowledge of the things and people that we love surviving us and enduring. Our children’s lives continue, so ours do not really end: this is modern man’s pathetic scrap of Egyptian immortality. Some, of course, will cling to their subdued Christian heaven or sternly orgiastic Allah’s paradise, but for most, there is something simpler in the wings: kids, grandkids, the family business, the life’s work, or just the trappings of one’s humdrum affairs: the pub and the high street continue on, the football club, the Government and the Constitution and the old regiment. If one is not depressed by these institutions ploughing on heartlessly, celestially unmoved by one’s death, then one is conversely heartened and they become like the drawings of food on a Pharaonic tomb wall. Oh, yes, the average man grabs at immortality with his dying breath, and he finds it—in his heirs, work, town, culture.
But the end of everything! How much destruction must man or nature wreak before your death becomes intolerably petty, truly mortal? Do you need an ice age or a swollen sun incinerating the Earth? Or would less suffice to end your fantasies of permanence? Your heirs slaughtered before your closing eyes? Your business in bankruptcy, your home and art in cinders? Let us say your church and all of its priests and every written or graphic mention of your god is destroyed, danced on by the sharp-clawed demons who serve some other, younger, crueller god. Let us say the city that has withstood all invaders for thousands of years, the city your family has lived in for as far back in time as you can peer, this pearl of the sea or the sands, this green and pleasant England, this eternal Rome, this pink Jerusalem or holy Mecca, this home of you and yours is dismantled, every last brick, the last bomb flattening the last house just before the last spittly drops of blood pump clear of your stuttering heart. Venice sinks into the sea. Paris burns. London howls. New York crumbles and Athens is reduced to its net ash. Not yet the end of everything for you? Every copy of every work of every author of the world’s literature ignites under the watchful eyes of unquenchably pyromaniacal illiterates. The very last copy of the very last history of your country or any other changes into black smoke, and all you can hope in your last breath is for the scantiest sliver of immortality: perhaps, some generations from now, word of mouth from one long-memoried genius actor to his heir to his heir to his heir will result in a brave effort to recall Hamlet and write it down again . . . and what does happen at the end? Hamlet poisons himself? Thumps Polonius with a club in a darkened room? Dresses up as a gravedigger and sneaks out the back?
The following items will be irretrievably lost someday quite soon: Beethoven’s works. The beer you prefer. All record of your ancestry. The place you first kissed a girl. Toffee. Coffee. The landscape you associate with peace and liberty. Any evidence of your boyhood, real or just fondly recalled. The sensation that all that stands before you and your loved ones is a series of aspirations, accomplishments, setbacks, meals, ceremonies, loves, heartbreaks, recoveries, next acts.