On trying to imagine being dead you come up against the horizons of language

 This is an abridged version from a wonderfully brave article by

Jenni Diski in the London Review of Books

 

Both infinity and death were beyond me.

They defeated me, and although I came to know that everyone was subject to death,

 it was some time before the penny dropped that I, too, would eventually be part

of the seething crowd of everyone who dies (‘I had not thought death had undone

so many’). Melodramatic accidents were story material, but an ordinary death

 at the end of my life was an absurd proposition, and so remote as to be hardly

worth getting a sweat up for. Even so, I’d lie awake trying to imagine

being dead just as I tried to imagine stepping off the end of infinity.

 

 Our inevitable imagined death isn’t properly a grief until you look at it

from the point of view of those who will remain alive without your being

in the world.

 

Beckett and Nabokov know:

I too shall cease and be as when I was not yet, only all over instead of in store.

From an Abandoned Work

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Speak, Memory

 

 This thought, this fact, is a genuine comfort, the only

one that works, to calm me down when the panic comes. It brings me real solace in the terror of the infinite desert. It doesn’t resolve the question (though, as an atheist I don’t really have one), but it offers me familiarity with ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’. I’ve been there. I’ve done that. And it soothes. When I find myself trembling at the prospect of extinction, I can steady myself by thinking of the abyss that I have already experienced.

Without a notion of a holiday camp heaven, (or a Paradise) something I seem never to have had, I was left with a new and special kind of endlessness, like infinity, but without you. By which I meant me. You and then not you. Me and then not … impossible sentence to finish. The prospect of extinction comes at last with an admission of the horror of being unable to imagine or be part of it, because it is beyond the you that has the capacity to think about it. I learned the meaning of being lost for words;

I came up against the horizon of language.