Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online Page B

pouffe’s contents, I don’t think my parents had any rare secrets. Part of what I’m doing—which may seem unnecessary—is trying to work out how dead they are. My father died in 1992, my mother in 1997. Genetically, they survive in two sons, two granddaughters, and two great-granddaughters: an almost indecent demographic orderliness. Narratively, they survive in the memory, which some trust more than others. My brother first expressed his suspicion of this faculty when I asked him about the food we ate at home. After confirming porridge, bacon, and suchlike, he went on:
     
At least, that’s how things stand in my memory. But you no doubt remember them differently, and I don’t think much of memory as a guide to the past. I first met my colleague and chum Jacques Brunschwig in 1977. It was at a conference in Chantilly. I missed my stop and got off the train at Créteil, thence taking a (very expensive) taxi and arriving late at the conference place, where Jacques greeted me. All that is wonderfully clear in my memory. In an interview, published in his Festschrift, Jacques talks a bit about some of his friends. He describes how he first met me, in 1977, at a conference in Chantilly: he met me at the station and recognized me as I stepped off the train. All that is wonderfully clear in his memory.
     
    Well, you might think, that’s professional philosophers for you: too busy theorizing in the abstract to notice what station they’re at, let alone what’s going on in the non-abstract world the rest of us inhabit. The French writer Jules Renard once speculated that “Perhaps people with a very good memory cannot have general ideas.” If so, my brother might get the untrustworthy memory and the general ideas; while I get the reliable memory and the particular ideas.
    I also have the family documentation in the shallow drawer to back me up. Here, for instance, are the results of my O level exams, taken when I was fifteen. Memory would certainly not have told me that my best marks were for mathematics, and my worst, embarrassingly, for English: 77 out of 100 for the language paper, and a humiliating 25 out of 50 for the English essay.
    My second-worst marks were, unsurprisingly, for General Science. The biology section of that exam included such tasks as drawing the transverse section of a tomato, and describing the process of fertilization as enjoyed by stamens and pistils. That was about as far as we got at home, too: parental pudeur redoubled the silence of the syllabus. As a result, I grew up with little knowledge of how the body worked; my grasp of sexual matters had all the vivid imbalance of a sisterless autodidact at a boys-only school; and though the calibrated academic progress I made through school and university was thanks to my brain, I hadn’t the slightest idea how this organ worked. I emerged into adult-hood with the unthinking assumption that you no more needed to understand human biology in order to live than you did car mechanics in order to drive. There were always hospitals and garages for when things went wrong.
    I remember being surprised to learn that the cells of my body would not last a lifetime, but would replace themselves at intervals (still, you could rebuild a car from spare parts, couldn’t you?). I wasn’t sure how often these makeovers occurred, but the awareness of cellular renewal mainly authorized jokes along the lines of “She was no longer the woman he had fallen in love with.” I hardly thought it a matter for panic: after all, my parents and grandparents must have gone through one if not two such refreshings, and they seemed to have suffered no seismic fracture; indeed, they remained all too unswervingly themselves. I don’t remember considering that the brain was part of the body, and therefore the same principles must apply up there as well. I might have been a little more inclined to panic had I discovered that the basic molecular structure of the brain, far from