Read Online Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Julian Barnes
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from masturbation; my niece because the stuff she prayed for wasn’t immediately delivered. But I suspect such breezy illogic is quite normal. Here, for instance, is the biologist Lewis Wolpert: “I was quite a religious child, saying my prayers each night and asking God for help on various occasions. It did not seem to help and I gave it all up around sixteen and have been an atheist ever since.” No subsequent reflection from any of us that perhaps God’s main business, were He to exist, might not be as an adolescent helpline, goods-provider or masturbation-scourge. No, out with Him once and for all.
A common response in surveys of religious attitudes is to say something like, “I don’t go to church, but I have my own personal idea of God.” This kind of statement makes me in turn react like a philosopher. Soppy, I cry. You may have your own personal idea of God, but does God have His own personal idea of you? Because that’s what matters. Whether He’s an old man with a white beard sitting in the sky, or a life force, or a disinterested prime mover, or a clockmaker, or a woman, or a nebulous moral force, or Nothing At All, what counts is what He, She, It, or Nothing thinks of you rather than you of them. The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque. It also doesn’t matter whether God is just or benevolent or even observant—of which there seems startlingly little proof—only that He exists.
The only old man with a white beard that I knew when growing up was my great-grandfather, my mother’s father’s father: Alfred Scoltock, a Yorkshireman and (inevitably) schoolmaster. There is a photo of my brother and me standing on either side of him in some now unidentifiable back garden. My brother is perhaps seven or eight, I am four or five, and Great-Grandpa is as old as the hills. His beard is not long and flowing as in cartoons of God, but short cut and bristly. (I don’t know if the scrape of it against my infant cheek actually happened, or is merely the memory of an apprehension.) My brother and I are smart and smiling—I more smiling than him—in short-sleeved shirts beautifully ironed by our mother; my shorts still have decent creases in them, though his are rather shockingly rumpled. Great-Grandpa is unsmiling, and to my eye looks faintly pained, as if aware that he is being recorded for a posterity he is on the very verge of. A friend, looking at this photo, dubbed him my “Chinese ancestor,” and there is something slightly Confucian about him.
Quite how wise he was, I have no idea. According to my mother, who favoured the males in her family, he was a highly intelligent autodidact. Two examples of this were ritually given: that he had taught himself chess, and was able to play to a high standard; and that when my mother, reading modern languages at Birmingham University, went on an exchange visit to Nancy, Great-Grandpa had taught himself French from a book so that he could converse with her pen pal when the two young women returned.
My brother met him several times, but his memories are less flattering, and perhaps explain why his smile in the photograph is more restrained than mine. The family’s Confucian “stank something horrible,” and was accompanied by “his daughter (Auntie Edie) who was unmarried, slightly soft in the head, and covered in eczema.” My brother recalls no chess playing or French speaking. In his memory, there is only an ability to do the Daily Mail crossword without filling in a single square. “He would doze after lunch, occasionally muttering aardvark or zebu. ”
Chapter 13
“I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t.” “God does not believe in our God.” “Yes, God exists, but He knows no more about it than we do.” The varying suppositions of Jules Renard, one of my dead, French, non-blood relatives. Born in 1864, he grew up in the Nièvre, a rustic and little-visited
A common response in surveys of religious attitudes is to say something like, “I don’t go to church, but I have my own personal idea of God.” This kind of statement makes me in turn react like a philosopher. Soppy, I cry. You may have your own personal idea of God, but does God have His own personal idea of you? Because that’s what matters. Whether He’s an old man with a white beard sitting in the sky, or a life force, or a disinterested prime mover, or a clockmaker, or a woman, or a nebulous moral force, or Nothing At All, what counts is what He, She, It, or Nothing thinks of you rather than you of them. The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque. It also doesn’t matter whether God is just or benevolent or even observant—of which there seems startlingly little proof—only that He exists.
The only old man with a white beard that I knew when growing up was my great-grandfather, my mother’s father’s father: Alfred Scoltock, a Yorkshireman and (inevitably) schoolmaster. There is a photo of my brother and me standing on either side of him in some now unidentifiable back garden. My brother is perhaps seven or eight, I am four or five, and Great-Grandpa is as old as the hills. His beard is not long and flowing as in cartoons of God, but short cut and bristly. (I don’t know if the scrape of it against my infant cheek actually happened, or is merely the memory of an apprehension.) My brother and I are smart and smiling—I more smiling than him—in short-sleeved shirts beautifully ironed by our mother; my shorts still have decent creases in them, though his are rather shockingly rumpled. Great-Grandpa is unsmiling, and to my eye looks faintly pained, as if aware that he is being recorded for a posterity he is on the very verge of. A friend, looking at this photo, dubbed him my “Chinese ancestor,” and there is something slightly Confucian about him.
Quite how wise he was, I have no idea. According to my mother, who favoured the males in her family, he was a highly intelligent autodidact. Two examples of this were ritually given: that he had taught himself chess, and was able to play to a high standard; and that when my mother, reading modern languages at Birmingham University, went on an exchange visit to Nancy, Great-Grandpa had taught himself French from a book so that he could converse with her pen pal when the two young women returned.
My brother met him several times, but his memories are less flattering, and perhaps explain why his smile in the photograph is more restrained than mine. The family’s Confucian “stank something horrible,” and was accompanied by “his daughter (Auntie Edie) who was unmarried, slightly soft in the head, and covered in eczema.” My brother recalls no chess playing or French speaking. In his memory, there is only an ability to do the Daily Mail crossword without filling in a single square. “He would doze after lunch, occasionally muttering aardvark or zebu. ”
Chapter 13
“I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t.” “God does not believe in our God.” “Yes, God exists, but He knows no more about it than we do.” The varying suppositions of Jules Renard, one of my dead, French, non-blood relatives. Born in 1864, he grew up in the Nièvre, a rustic and little-visited
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