Yet another daily excerpt from Cold World…

Like Hopkins’s “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”, Philip Larkin’s late poem “Aubade” begins with the speaker coming to dreadful consciousness in pre-dawn darkness:

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

To see “what’s really always there” is to see nothing that one does not always see, but to be deprived of the ability to make-believe that it is not “really…there”. Larkin’s concern in “Aubade” is also with a failure of language, distributed between the rational apologetics of philosophy (“specious stuff”) on the one hand and the “vast moth-eaten musical brocade” of religious consolation on the other. Neither is able to dispel the “special way of being afraid” that is the fear of having “nothing to think with, / nothing to love and link with”. While philosophy calls on the capacity to “think” to dispel the fear of death, religious mythology employs the capacity to “love and link”, to make life and death part of a web of meaning; but death for Larkin is precisely the destitution of both of these capacities.

It is not clear, however, that what Larkin is really afraid of is actually death as such. What really horrifies him is rather the thought of “dying, and being dead” (my italics). The condition he describes as mortally and implacably terrifying is neither one of non-being (which philosophy identifies as the destination of all mortal things), nor one of eternal suffering (which religion declares to be the immortal fate of those unreconciled with God), but rather one of permanently anaesthetised existence. Death is “the anaesthetic from which none come round”, a radical privation of aesthetic sense: “no sight, no sound, / No touch or taste or smell”.

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