wrestling with death

From R.R. Reno's review in First Things of Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes-- a book that sounds quite interesting...

Death has many masks. He comes cruel with his sweeping scythe, cutting down men and women in their prime. He comes kind and compassionate as a nurse, closing the eyes of long-suffering patients. Death comes slowly and shyly behind closed drapes, and death comes suddenly, brazen and bragging in news reports of drive-by shootings and rush-hour accidents. Like life itself, death is ever changing, evading our desire to make a truce, establish a working agreement, and broker a compromise.

In his charming, playful reflections...Julian Barnes offers readers no cheap consolations....takes us down many alleys and side paths, some literary, a few philosophical, and most personal. The result is something that is really quite rare: a serious book, about the most serious of human realities, that doesn't take itself too seriously...

People pay the rent in different ways, none of which Barnes finds fully satisfactory. One approach treats the darkness of death as a tonic....Another approach treats the grave as a test of existential seriousness....The opposite of calm acceptance is passionate protest...[Montaigne] advises us to counterattack with daily recollections of our mortality....We often think of fame as a bulwark against extinction...

Yet, when it comes to the difficulties of life, for Julian Barnes, the weightlessness of modern unbelief plays a crucial, sad, central role. “I don't believe in God,” Barnes writes at the outset, “but I miss Him”...

At issue is not consolation in the face of death. Barnes does at times advert to friends who believe in heaven. But in the main he misses God because without him life seems small and unimportant....