Elizabeth Finch: A novel

by Julian Barnes

One of our bonds was, paradoxically, that we rarely agreed about anything, except that whatever government was in power was useless, God almost certainly did not exist, life was for the living, and you could never have too many bar snacks in noisy packets.

—And then there is the inevitable third stylisation—of posthumous memory. Leading to the moment when the last living person to remember you has their very last thought about you. There ought to be a name for that final event, which marks your final extinction.

To please the dead. Naturally, we honour the dead, but in honouring them, we somehow make them even more dead. But to please the dead, this brings them to life again.

Julian declined to persecute the Christians unto death. He obliged them to take the slow, winding, rocky path of terrestrial life. He made them sweat out the wearisome human span for a future chance of paradise instead of being propelled there directly in a turbocharged blast of their own blood. The tactic was cunning: deprive those eager to die of their martyrdoms and Galilean exceptionalism might not seem so exceptional: it might relapse into mere doctrinal dissent.

Q. What happens (in the minds of men and women) when a god is no longer worshipped? Does he cease to exist? Or does he continue to circle the earth like another piece of space junk, beeping hopefully on a dead wavelength?

I returned to those key opening words of the Handbook of Epictetus. “Some things are up to us and some things are not up to us.” The things that are up to us “are by nature free, unhindered, and unimpeded”; while the things that are not up to us are “weak, enslaved, hindered, not our own.”