Cyril Connolly’s Cure for the Fear of Death
To be taken LOGICALLY
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This piece by Cyril Connolly originally appeared in the February / March 1975 edition of The London Magazine. The pages were written in 1949 for a girl who had expressed a fear of dying to the author.
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I. Either there is survival after death or there isn’t (extinction).
II. If there is survival it cannot be bodily survival for we know the body decays, therefore it must be spiritual survival.
III. Spiritual survival may be impersonal or personal. If impersonal we have nothing to fear, for the experience of spirit without personality cannot be painful; if personal (and it is difficult to imagine personal spirit) it cannot be very different from our most spiritual moments in this life as they without exception are blissful, timeless and exacting.
IV. ‘Hell’ is always peopled with bodies since from the cravings of the body and its will comes unhappiness – but we know the body decays therefore there can be no hell.
V. If there is no survival then there is extinction, for there can be no in-between state (the ‘transmigration of souls’ theory amounts to extinction since souls have no awareness of the process by which they are re-incarnated or of the arrangements of matter which they previously inhabited).
VI. Extinction means extinction of all perception and therefore is not to be feared any more than deep sleep is to be feared. One cannot feel about the absence of feeling.
VII. If there is extinction, then death does not exist, there is life or non-life which Lucretius meant when he wrote the wonderful line:
‘Mors igitur non est; ad nos neque pertinent hilum’
‘Death therefore does not exist; neither does it concern us a scrap’
So what do people fear? They fear either Hell, remorse, guilt, retribution, ideas which they have received as children from their parents, or they fear the loneliness and pain and leave-taking of dying and confuse this with death itself, or they fear a claustrophobic termination and confuse extinction with pain, conscious of what one misses by being extinguished. Let us take these fears one by one.
1) Remorse, guilt etc. exist only in our own imagination from which we are set free by death, however one regards it.
2) The pain and isolation of dying can be reduced by drugs, particularly morphine, but this alone seems to me a real event and legitimate cause of fear. Let us hope then we die either suddenly or in the care of good doctors – but as we can’t do much about this there is as yet no point in thinking about it.
3) Do not confuse extinction with being buried alive – or if you do, realise that you are projecting a neurosis, claustrophobia, into the next world.
The opposite of fearing death is to love life, and the painful consideration of non-existence will be found to disappear when life is lived fully and to arise chiefly when apathy and fear of life exist as well. Lovers hardly fear death at all, which is why they can afford so closely to contemplate it. If you cannot cultivate love, then cultivate courage, as the Romans did, and if the prospect of extinction seems too forbidding, then try the other, since there is no CONCLUSIVE evidence for or against either. Personally, while my reason inclines me to extinction and a few childish fears to hell, remorse and judgement, my temperament has constructed its own version, that when we die we become what we have loved, and that, were I to be vaporised tomorrow, the bulk of me would soon be staring out at the world through those topaz panes at which I now dream my life away looking in.
Cyril
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Cyril Connolly was an English literary critic and writer. He was editor of Horizon magazine.
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