Thomas Laqueur

‘He had never had a moment when death was not terrible to him,’ reports Boswell on the occasion of needling his famous friend with the news that the atheist philosopher David Hume had died well and without repentance. ‘The horror of death, which I had always observed in Dr Johnson, appeared strong tonight.’ Sherwin Nuland a surgeon from Yale, speaks to the Johnson in each of us, to our hunger for knowledge of our inevitable end: ‘Everyone wants to know the details of dying … we are irresistibly attracted by the very anxieties we find most terrifying.’…

The Facts of Life is symptomatic of the tensions to be found in its sources: it is an elusive book, offering vistas of liberation and oppression. In all but their barest outline the facts of life are not really facts, and ‘sexual knowledge’ does not, by and large, come to be known; while ‘creation’ is so protean a notion here as to encompass everything from 18th-century advice on married love, to 19th-century soirées where women told men about their sexual lives, to 20th-century anti-venereal disease campaigns. The book’s object never really comes into focus. Knowledge, finally, of what? The repeated promises of teen and women’s magazines, month after month, to reveal ‘The Secrets of Sex in just Ten Minutes’ (this in January’s Cosmopolitan) suggest that maybe there is nothing to tell, only telling itself.

We understand explicitly, as Nietzsche remarked in the Genealogy of Morals, what earlier generations felt in their bones: ‘Only that which does not cease to hurt remains in memory.’ Remembering and mourning demand that the past is somehow kept present; they demand recollection as the pain of immediate loss diminishes. And yet we – that is, we moderns – are also acutely aware of just how utterly past the past is, how historical it is, how even the worst horrors lose their sting. As Walt Whitman wrote of the Civil War:’

In a happier age, Immanuel Kant identified one of the problems of understanding any of the genocides which come all too easily to mind. It is the problem of the mathematical sublime. The arithmetician has no more difficulty in principle comprehending one murder than 600,000 – the number murdered in the Armenian atrocities of 1916-17 or by Nazi Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front in 1941 before the death camps were fully geared up – or five to six million, the best estimates we have of the number of Jews murdered in the camps. At a purely cognitive level any number can be understood by adding, unit by unit, to the unit that comes before. But for Kant, the ability to take in great magnitudes – to feel their sublime terror – is ultimately an aesthetic act and one which depends on gaining the right distance from the subject. His example comes from a French general’s account of a visit to the Pyramids and his anxiety about how to feel the emotional effect of their sheer magnitude. Too close and we see only stone by stone without taking in the full sweep from base to peak; too far away and we lose the sublime wonder predicated on the sense that something so massive was made discrete block by discrete block.’