And Finally

by Henry Marsh

For most of us, as we age, our brains shrink steadily, and if we live long enough, they end up resembling shrivelled walnuts, floating in a sea of cerebro-spinal fluid, confined within our skull. And yet we usually still feel that we are our true selves, albeit diminished, slow and forgetful. The problem is that our true self, our brain, has changed, and as we have changed with our brains, we have no way of knowing that we have changed.

The lockdown coincided with perfect spring weather – so fine, prolonged and warm that it spoke of climate change. The bushes in the little paradise of my back garden almost all burst into flower all at once, and the trees went from being bare winter skeletons to towers of spreading green leaves in a matter of days. The bees came rushing out of their hive in front of my workshop and shot up into the sunlight, rejoicing in vertical zigzags. And the lockdown brought complete peace and quiet. The air felt as fresh as if you were in the countryside and the sky was a clear and deep blue. The only sounds were of birds singing, children playing and the wind in the trees. And at night, at first, there was a full moon, looking down kindly on the suddenly silent city, and you could see the stars. It was a vision of heaven, here in London, SW19. Time had stopped. Eternity is not the infinite prolongation of time but instead its abolition. (Cosmologists tell us that time really can stop – but at the event horizon of a black hole rather than in a back garden at the bottom of Wimbledon Hill.)

When I am lying on my deathbed, I sternly told myself, I do not want to look back on the present time, when I am still relatively well, and feel I wasted it by allowing myself to become miserable at the thought that, sooner or later, I will be lying on my deathbed.

Care, I thought ruefully, seems to be increasingly replaced by printed handouts.

We are like little boats that our parents launch onto the ocean, and we sail round the world, full circle, to return finally to the harbour from which we started, but by then our parents are long gone.