1

The last thing I ever said to Brenin was: we’ll meet again in dreams. I said it as the vet inserted the hypodermic needle into a vein on his front right leg – I remember the leg, I remember the vein – and injected a lethal amount of anaesthetic into his body. By the time I had completed the sentence, he was gone. I’d like to think he wasn’t there anyway. I’d like to think he was in Alabama, nuzzling up in his mother’s fur. I’d like to think he was in Knockduff with Nina and Tess, leaping through the seas of barley as the diffident Irish sun rose on a scene of misty golden splendour. I’d like to think he was with them again on Wimbledon Common, crashing through the woods in pursuit of squirrels and those rascally rabbits. And I’d like to think he was with them again, splashing through the warm Mediterranean surf.

The cancer that had announced itself with his illness of a year ago had returned, this time metastasized and irredeemably malign. It was a lymphosarcoma, which is treatable in humans but, the vicissitudes of veterinary science being what they are, almost always results in death in dogs. I decided against any invasive attempts to save him this time, because I really don’t think he would have survived surgery, let alone any more post-surgical complications. I was shocked to discover that, in the year since Brenin’s illness, Jean-Michel, the vet whose old-school expertise had saved him last time, had already gone – also the victim of cancer. And when the vet who had taken over the practice told me this, I think I sensed Brenin’s time was up too.

I kept him as comfortable as I could, and for the first time in his life I let him sleep on the bed with me – to the immense chagrin of Nina and Tess, who couldn’t believe I was excluding them from this appealing and unprecedented treat. When the painkillers stopped working and his pain – in my honest, agonized but deeply fallible judgement – became too great, I drove him into Béziers to be killed. And there he died, in the back of the same sort of Jeep in which we had driven all around the south-eastern United States all those years ago – in search of rugby and parties and women and beer.

I couldn’t bury him in the garden – the owners of the house would almost certainly have taken exception to that. So I buried him at a place where we stopped every day on our walks, a small clearing surrounded by beech trees and scrub oak. The ground was sandy and it didn’t take me long to dig a substantial hole. When I had put Brenin in the ground, I built over his grave a cairn, made from rocks I carried across from the digue: the dyke that prevented the winter storm surges from sweeping up into the village. This was a long and arduous process, as the digue was a couple of hundred yards away, and it took me well into the night to finish the job. Then I lit a driftwood bonfire and decided to sit with my brother through the rest of the night.

This is the part of the story that I am reluctant to tell, since – once again – I come across as completely psychotic, which I no doubt was. Keeping me company were Nina and Tess, and two litres of Jack Daniel’s, which I had stockpiled knowing that this night was coming soon. I had been dry for the past few weeks, since I needed to keep my mind clear to make the best decisions I could for Brenin. I couldn’t afford to have any alcohol-induced melancholy make me send him on his way a moment before his time; nor could I allow any alcohol-induced euphoria to force him to cling to this life when it was not worth living. It was the first time in years that I had been dry for more than a day or two, and I planned on decisively breaking that drought tonight. And so, after Brenin had been taken care of, Nina and Tess lay quietly by the fire and listened to my bourbon-fuelled rage against the dying of the light. By the time I was significantly into my second litre, what had started out as a quiet rumination about the possibility of an afterlife had transformed into a raging torrent of invective directed against God. It went something like this: Come on then, you f*****g c**t! You show me. If we live on, you f****r, show me now!

The next bit sounds horrendously far-fetched, but I swear to God it’s true. At the very moment I said this, I looked across the fire and saw him: I saw Brenin’s ghost of stone.

I want to emphasize just how inexplicable this is. When I made the cairn, I travelled up and down the digue, picking up rocks wherever I found them detached or loose. Then I carried them back a couple of hundred yards or so to the clearing. When I got there, I simply dropped them on Brenin’s grave. I repeated this many, many times, and the entire process took around five hours. The dropping of the rocks on the grave was an entirely random process. I am still convinced of this. I didn’t place the stones, I just dropped them. I had no overall vision of the completed cairn driving me on. On the contrary, I just wanted it finished, and I wanted to get astonishingly drunk.

But now – there – staring back at me through the flames was Brenin’s ghost of stone. The front of the cairn was his head: a diamond-shaped slab of rock, snout resting, as was his fashion, on the ground; and with a stain of moss on the sharp end that looked, for the world, like his nose. The rest of the cairn was a wolf curled up as if in the snow – a habit inculcated in Brenin by his Arctic forebears, and which he found difficult to break, even in the heat of an Alabama or Languedoc summer. There, at the zenith of my rage and need, he stared back at me.

Depth psychologists – Freudians, Jungians and their ilk – might say that I unconsciously created the image of a sleeping Brenin; my dropping of the stones on his grave was guided by an unconscious desire to create a monument to him in his image. Perhaps they are right, but the explanation strikes me as deeply implausible. It doesn’t explain the prominent role played by chance in the construction of the cairn. When I had carried a rock back to the mound, I didn’t place it there; I dropped it, and immediately turned and set off in search of the next one. Some rocks stayed where they were dropped, but most didn’t; they rolled to the lowest available point. If they rolled, and where they rolled to, were matters of chance. And this is why the depth-psychological story falls short. It is one thing for my unconscious to control my actions, but it is quite another for my unconscious to control chance itself.

It would be easy to explain Brenin’s stone ghost as an alcohol-induced hallucination or confabulation. It would be even easier to think of it as a dream. We shall indeed meet again in dreams. But Brenin’s stone ghost never left. I fell asleep on the ground by the fire, and perhaps would have frozen to death as the fire died, but for a fortuitous bout of vomiting that forced me to wake up. But Brenin’s stone ghost was still there when I awoke. It is still there today.

2

Brenin’s last year was a gift for both of us. I remember that year as a season of never-ending summer. I’ve never been one to obsessively keep track of time. I lost my last watch in a poker game in Charleston, South Carolina, back in 1992 and I haven’t got around to replacing it yet. Not having a timepiece is, of course, scarcely liberation from the constraints of time – I seem to spend half my life asking people what the time is. But the best thing about living in France was that it was the nearest thing to a timeless existence I have been able to experience or imagine. There, we lived not by the clock, but by the sun. Actually, who am I kidding? We did live by a clock, but it was Nina’s clock, not my own.

I would arise at sun-up – in the summer that was around 6 in the morning. I would know it was sun-up, because that was Nina’s signal to get up and start licking whatever hand or foot of mine was exposed outside the bedsheet. And if no hand or foot was exposed outside the sheet, she would rearrange the sheet with her nose until there was. I would make my way rather gingerly down the steep pine staircase – my sluggish early-morning wariness the result of a blown-out knee from my rugby days – laptop in hand. I would sit on the terrace at the front of the house and write during the misty mosquitoed cool of the early morning. Brenin would lie over in the northern corner of the garden, curled up as in snow, with his snout stretching along the ground. Nina, the pack’s timekeeper, would lie by the gate, beady eyes always on me, waiting for the promised walk that still lay a few hours off. Tess, the pack’s princess, would wait until I was immersed in my writing, and then glide silently back into the house, to see if she could sneak on to my bed without me realizing – which she usually could.

Then, around 10, before it became too hot, Nina would get up, come over to me and put her head in my lap. If this didn’t have the desired reaction – me desisting in my typing – she would flick her snout up sharply and repeatedly into my forearms, making further typing impossible. The message was unequivocal: time to go to the beach. This was not so much a stroll as a military operation. First, there was the preliminary rounding up of parasols and other beach paraphernalia such as balls and/or Frisbees. This would inform the other members of the pack of our impending march, and the result was a chorus of howls, yips and barks that signalled to everyone in the village that we were on the move. The Frisbee was for Nina, an enthusiastic and accomplished swimmer. The parasols were for Brenin and Tess. They would paddle and sometimes, on breathless days when the sea was calm and clear, they could be coaxed into swimming properly. But they never really enjoyed it – they would swim out to me, tension bordering on panic clearly visible on their faces, but when they reached me they would immediately turn around and swim back to the beach. That was where they preferred to spend most of their time. When I became tired of watching them panting away in the increasingly hot sun, I invested in a couple of parasols, one each. Looking back, I now understand that by this time in my life I must have been becoming a little ‘peculiar’ – an old woman with lots of cats sort of peculiar. On the plus side, the numerous thieves that populated southern French beaches during the summer months always gave our pitch a wide birth. As did the other dogs.

During the walk to the beach, there were certain things that had to be done in a certain order and manner. The neighbourhood dogs were greeted and, where necessary, intimidated in the appropriate fashion: first Vanille, the female English setter, to be intimidated by Nina, with Tess acting as sidekick, but greeted in a friendly if somewhat aloof way by Brenin; then Rouge, the big male ridgeback, to have his garden fence urinated on by Brenin, but to be met with an enthusiasm that bordered on gushing by both Nina and Tess; and finally the female Dogo Argentino that I mentioned earlier, but whose name I never discovered, who once made the mistake of attacking Tess. Accordingly, Tess singled her out for special treatment: she would store up her first bowel movement of the morning until we reached the dog’s house and then would deposit it as near as was humanly – or rather caninely – possible to the garden fence. Thinking about it now, perhaps that is why the Dogo always tried to bite me.

Tess was, in general, a master of the tactical deployment of faeces. Once, when we lived in Wimbledon and were walking across the golf-course part of the common, she actually managed, in a display of breathtaking accuracy, to poo directly on top of a golf ball that had landed nearby. My advice, ‘If I were you I would take the drop’, did little to mollify the partly enraged but mostly incredulous member of London Scottish Golf Club.

After the last of the houses, we would enter the vineyards – or rather, the failed vineyards, long since abandoned to the salty ground and frequent storm surges. Through the vineyards and on to the maïre, which ran from the digue down to the beach at its northern end. At the right times of the year, the maïre would be carpeted in pink flamingos – the flamants roses, as they are known in the far more beautiful French language. If one happened to stray on to the shore, Nina and Tess would make sure it was given a good chase until it flew away back to its own legitimate domain. Thankfully, neither of them ever came remotely close to catching one. While they chased ineffectually, Brenin would give me a look as if to say, ‘The youth of today. If I were a few years younger …’

Once we reached the beach, Nina would make a beeline for the water and start bouncing around, loudly demanding her Frisbee. There was a strict ‘No dogs’ policy on the beach during the summer – although the policy didn’t actually mention wolves per se. But the French, of course, are well known for taking the laws of their land as a series of suggestions rather than requirements; the law was rarely enforced and the beach was typically carpeted with dogs. The gendarmes would turn up occasionally and make a show of fining people, but whenever we saw them we would head off down the beach away from them, safe in the knowledge that they would never walk far. We did get caught a few times, however – an annoyance that had less to do with the amount of the fine and more to do with the length of the lecture you would be required to listen to before they fined you. Through a combination of luck, stealth and feigned gormlessness, we managed to negotiate the entire summer with fines totalling no more than 100 euros or so.

After the beach and just before everything closed for lunch – again, it was Nina who would let us know when it was time to go – we would walk over to the village and the boulangerie. I would divide up a couple of pains au chocolat between the three of them. This division always took place according to a clearly defined ritual. We would leave the boulangerie and walk over to the stone bench a few yards in front of the shop. I would sit, open the paper bag and tear off bits of the pain, feeding them in turn to each of them, while trying to avoid the copious amounts of saliva flying in my general direction. Swimming is hungry work. Following that, we would head over to Yvette’s bar, where I would have an inadvisably large number of glasses of rosé – the daytime drink of choice in Languedoc – while the dog-loving Yvette gave them a bowl of water and made a big fuss of Brenin. Then we would walk home, around the back of the village and down through the woodlands that bordered the house.

When we arrived home, we would all find ourselves shadows in which to spend the heat of the day. I would again write. At this time of day, the inside of the house was far too hot for Tess’s liking, so she used to lie at my feet under the table on the terrace. Nina preferred the far wall on that terrace, shaded for most of the day by the terrace’s roof. The northern part of the garden now being in sunshine, Brenin would head upstairs to the sun terrace, seeking out its shady corner. This gave him a fine view of the surrounding countryside and, more importantly, an early view of anything of interest that was approaching. We’d begin to stir when the shadows grew long, around 7. First, I would make dinner for the four-legged ones. Then a few aperitifs for the two-legged one. Then we would go for a walk, one which would typically culminate at La Réunion, our favourite restaurant.

I say ‘our’, rather than ‘my’, favourite restaurant advisedly. I went there for my dinner. Brenin and the girls went there for their second dinner. Lionel and Martine, the proprietors, always saved us one of the big round tables in the corner, where there was plenty of room for the dogs to stretch out. I would make my way slowly through a four-course meal, and the animals would levy certain not insignificant taxes on each course. As everyone who has lived in France will know, it is impossible to be a vegetarian there – certainly not in country France. When I first mentioned my dietary restrictions to Lionel, he looked at me uncomprehendingly and suggested chicken. Consequently, I had, at this time, followed Brenin and the girls and become a piscetarian. I would typically start with the St Jacques salad, since it was utterly magnificent and would contain anything up to ten scallops. Three of those would go to the canine contingent. Following that, three strips of the smoked salmon would be levied from the second course. Most of the skin, tail and head of the sole meunière that often followed would similarly be siphoned off from the third course. And I would get a free extra crêpe to divide up between them when I had the final course – Lionel’s kind contribution to the evening’s canine fare. Of course, I kept the wine and the marc de muscat – a type of brandy made from the muscat grape – to myself. We would walk gently home after that, following the edge of the digue – me pleasantly drunk and my canine friends pleasantly full. We always slept well.

That was every summer’s day during the last year of Brenin’s life. And it is a long and beautiful summer in Languedoc. The winter, of course, forced on us certain adjustments. Tragically, La Réunion was closed between mid-November and mid-March – Lionel and Martine worked the ski resorts during those months. There was also less swimming involved – certainly by me if not Nina. Nina allowed me to sleep in until around 8 a.m. And my early-morning writing was done largely indoors. My midday sojourn in Yvette’s tended to last somewhat longer – since I didn’t have anywhere to go in the evenings. But the basic outline of the day – the day’s essence – was the same.

Through all of this – summer and winter – it was Nina who was the keeper of time. In this, she was driven on by something that happened fairly early during our stay in France – an event so dark and tragic that, even now, years later, I suspect it still haunts her. It was my fault and I take full responsibility. I don’t know if I spent just a little too long at my laptop that day, or maybe I tarried just a little too long in the comforting cool waters of the Mediterranean. Whatever the reason, when we arrived at the village that day … the boulangerie had closed for lunch. And it is a long and beautiful lunch in Languedoc.

Of course, objectively – and it’s easy for me to take this attitude – it wasn’t really that much of a big deal. I just had to spend an hour or so longer than usual in Yvette’s – which I happily did – and the boulangerie would be open again at 4 p.m. But looking at food-related issues objectively has never been one of Nina’s strengths. Nor has delay of gratification. The hours she spent in Yvette’s that day were ones of agonized confusion, existential angst of the most debilitating sort (it goes without saying that Yvette’s bar didn’t do food). She paced up and down the entire time, a crazed glint in her eyes. This was not how it was supposed to be. This was the long, dark lunchtime of her soul.

Come 4 p.m., of course, the world all made sense again and the day could resume its normal course. But after that day, Nina was motivated by twin fears: the fear of the boulangerie being closed by the time she arrived and the fear of not going to La Réunion. God forbid I should ever take a different route to that restaurant in the evening. As soon as we got within a few hundred yards of it, she was going anyway, whether the rest of us came or not.

It wasn’t until afterwards – after Brenin had died and I had moved away from France – that I really understood just how intensely uniform this year of my life had been. But I suppose it was just a continuation of the sort of life we had enjoyed in Ireland and London. Almost everyone I know would describe this life – its regularity and repetition – as monotonous, even boring in the extreme. But I think I learned more from those days than perhaps from anyone or anything. The key to what I learned is to be found in a deceptively simple question: what did Brenin lose when he died?

3

It should be pretty clear that I – a madman howling at the moon and raging at God – lost a lot when Brenin died. And people will tell you – as they have told me – that this was a function of the sad and solitary life I led during those years. Maybe that’s true. But I’m not interested in what I lost; I’m interested in what he lost.

In what sense is death a bad thing? Not for other people, but for the person who dies? In what sense would your death be a bad thing for you? Death, whatever else it is, is not something that occurs in a life. Wittgenstein once said that his life had no limit in the way that his visual field had no limit. Obviously, he didn’t mean that we live for ever – Wittgenstein himself died, also of cancer, in 1951. Rather, he was pointing out that death is the limit of a life; and the limit of a life is not something that can occur in that life any more than the limit of a visual field is something that can occur in that field. The limit of a visual field is not something you see: you are aware of it precisely because of what you don’t see. This is how it is with limits: a limit of something is not part of that thing – if it was, then it wouldn’t be the limit of it.

If we accept this, then we are immediately faced with a problem: it seems that death cannot be harmful to the person who dies. The classic version of the problem was stated, 2,000 years before Wittgenstein, by the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. Death, Epicurus argued, cannot harm us. While we are alive, death has not happened and so can’t have harmed us yet. And when we die – since death is the limit of our life and not an event in it – we are no longer around for it to harm. Therefore death cannot be a bad thing, at least not for the person who dies.

What is wrong with Epicurus’s argument? Indeed, is there anything wrong with it? Among humans at least, there is near-universal consensus that there is something wrong with it. And there also appears to be substantial agreement on why it is wrong: death harms us because of what it takes away. Death is what philosophers call a harm of deprivation. That, however, is the easy part. The hard part lies in understanding what it takes from us, and how it can take anything from us when we are no longer around to have anything taken.

We will not get very far in answering these questions by saying that death harms us because it takes away our life. For if Wittgenstein is right, and death is the limit of our life, and so does not occur within our life, then a life is precisely what we do not have when death happens to us. But we can only have something taken from us if we actually have that thing. So how can death take something from us that we no longer have?

A more promising answer, I think, is possibilities. Death harms us because it takes away all of our possibilities. But, in the end, I don’t think this idea is going to work either. Part of the problem is that possibilities are too promiscuous; there are far too many possibilities, and so nothing in a possibility that makes it intrinsically mine or yours. Among the possibilities I have are ones in which I take no interest whatsoever. It is possible that I will become a tinker, tailor, soldier or sailor; it is possible that I will become a beggarman or thief. But I have no interest in following up on, or trying to realize, any of these possibilities. It is possible that I will die tomorrow, or in fifty years’ time. But I have far more interest in trying to realize the latter possibility than the former. Possibilities just come too cheap. Each one of us has an infinite – or at least a huge and indefinite – number of possibilities. And we are only interested in realizing a tiny fraction of those. Indeed, we are not even aware of most of our possibilities.

More than that, many of our possibilities are ones that we fervently hope will never be realized. Most of us are probably not too keen on following up on the beggarman/thief possibilities. It is possible that any one of us might become a murderer, torturer, paedophile, madman or madwoman. Something is possible if there is no contradiction involved in supposing that it happens: that is the definition of a possibility. So, no matter how unlikely you think it is that any of these possibilities will be realized, they are still possibilities. Some of our possibilities we hope will come true. But some of them we pray will never come true. Among our possibilities are ones that we would embrace and others that we would reject in the strongest possible terms. I doubt that death can harm us by depriving us of possibilities in which we have no interest. And I’m certain that it can’t harm us by depriving us of possibilities we would reject with every fibre of our being. In the case of some possibilities, we would rather die than see them realized. Death cannot harm us by depriving us of those.

However, the concept of possibilities does point us in the direction of a more promising account. It is only some of our possibilities that are relevant to the harm of death: those we hope are realized or come true. To each of these possibilities there corresponds a desire: a desire for the possibility to be realized. If we are serious about this desire, but we can’t satisfy it immediately, then we might find ourselves making it a goal to satisfy this desire. And if this goal is a difficult one to achieve, we might find ourselves engaging much of our energy and time in a project for achieving this goal. It is, I think, in terms of the concepts of desire, goal and project that we humans will inevitably try to understand why death is a bad thing for the person who dies.

It might seem as if we have made no headway against Epicurus’s problem. If death is the limit of a life, and not something that occurs in a life, by the time it happens we are no longer around to be deprived of anything – including desires, goals and projects. However, desires, goals and projects all have something in common, something that is crucial to Epicurus’s problem. They are all what we might call future-directed: in their very nature they direct us beyond the present time towards the future. It is because we have desires, goals and projects that we have a future: a future is something that each of us has now, at the present time. Death harms us by depriving us of a future.

4

The idea of losing a future is, when you think about it, a very strange one. And its strangeness comes from the strangeness of the idea of the future. The future does not yet exist. So how can you lose it? Indeed, you can lose a future only if you now in some sense have one. But how can you have something that does not yet exist? This shows, at the very least, that the ideas of having and losing in this context have very different meanings from when they occur in other, more usual contexts. It may be possible to have a future, but not in the same sense in which you might have broad shoulders or a Rolex watch. And if a murderer were to deprive you of your future, the sense of deprivation involved would be quite different from when age deprives you of your shoulders or a mugger deprives you of your watch.

If death is a bad thing for each one of us because it deprives us of a future, then a future must be something we have now, in the present time. We have a future because we have – actually and now – states that direct or bind us towards a future. These states are desires, goals and projects. Each one of us is, as Martin Heidegger put it, being-towards-a-future. Each one of us is, in our essential nature, directed towards a future that does not yet exist. And, in this sense at least, we can be said to have a future.

Let’s begin with desires. The most basic feature of desires is that they can be satisfied or thwarted. Brenin’s desire for a drink will be satisfied if he walks across the room to his bowl and drinks. It will be thwarted if he gets there and finds the bowl empty. However, satisfying a desire takes time. It also, typically, takes time for a desire to be thwarted. It takes time for Brenin to cross the room to his bowl; and so it takes time for his desire to be either satisfied or thwarted. This is one sense, the most basic sense, in which desires are future-directed: satisfying them takes time. The same is even more obviously true for goals and projects, both of which are essentially long-term desires. Desires can be satisfied or thwarted, and goals and projects can be fulfilled or unfulfilled. And satisfying and fulfilling take time.

However, there is a more complicated sense in which we can have a future. A desire, goal or project can be directed towards a future in two quite different ways. Like Brenin’s desire for a drink of water, the desire can direct us towards a future in the sense that satisfying it takes time. If Brenin is to satisfy the desire, he must persist beyond the present moment – he must survive at least as long as it takes him to cross the room to his bowl. However, for some desires the connection with the future is stronger and more intimate than this. Some desires involve an explicit concept of the future. Walking across the room to drink something is one thing. Planning your life around a vision of how you would like your future to be is quite another.

Relative to other animals, we humans spend a disproportionate amount of time doing things that, at least on some level, we would really rather not do. We do this because of a vision of how we would like our future lives to be. This is the entire point of the slog through our prolonged education and subsequent careers. We all know how thankless the latter can be; and even I, a professional educator, can’t pretend that the former is a non-stop barrel of laughs. But we do these things anyway because we have desires of a certain sort. These are desires that cannot be satisfied either now or in the immediate future but might, if we are talented enough, lucky enough and work hard enough, be satisfied at some unspecified future time. Our current activities – educational, vocational and often avocational – are devised and implemented with, and oriented towards, a vision of the future they may secure for us. To have these sorts of desires, you need to have a concept of the future: you must be able to think about the future as the future.

So, it seems, we can have a future in two different senses. There is an implicit sense: I have desires whose satisfaction takes time. And there is an explicit sense: I am orienting or arranging my life around a vision of how I would like the future to be. However, when the ape in us sees a distinction, it also sees a potential advantage. First, the ape identifies which of the distinguishable elements is most true of, or applies most naturally to, it. Then it claims that this element is superior to the other one. Believe me, I know: I am that ape.

It is the second sense of having a future that seems distinctive of human beings. It is not clear that other animals spend much, if any, of their time orienting their behaviour around a conception of how they would like their future to be. Delayed gratification seems to be a character trait that, while not unique to humans, is certainly more pronounced in humans than any other animal. And then the ape in us slides naturally from this factual claim to a moral evaluation based on it. The second sense of having a future, we inevitably think, is superior to the first. Of course, we are clever animals and we can back this moral evaluation up. In the second sense – where I organize myself and my life around a vision of how I would like the future to be – I am more closely tied to the future. I have my future in a stronger, more robust, more important sense than any other non-human animal does. Imagine two athletes, one dedicated and hard-working, the other a talented slacker. Both miss out on Olympic glory, finishing, let us suppose, just outside the medals. The first athlete, whose life has been formed and fashioned through iron discipline and faultless application, seems to lose more than the second athlete, who never really gave it their best shot. The first athlete’s loss was greater because their investment – the time, effort, energy and emotion they put into what they were doing – was greater. What you lose when you die is a function of the investment you have made in that life. And because humans have a concept of the future, and so can discipline, organize and orient their present behaviour around a conception of how they would like their future to be, they make a greater investment in their lives than other animals. Therefore humans lose more when they die than other animals. Dying is worse for a human than for any other animal. Conversely, the life of a human is more important than that of any other animal. This is just one more facet of human superiority: we lose more when we die.

5

I used to believe this story. In fact, the last two sections were developed by yours truly – ape that I am – in Animals Like Us and also, somewhat more breezily, in The Philosopher at the End of the Universe. Now I cringe at my lack of insight and my ugly simian prejudices. Investment: how simian can you get? The fatal flaw, I now see, is not with the account itself. I think we humans are constrained to think of death as a harm of deprivation: that is, we are constrained to think that death is a bad thing because it takes something away from us. I don’t think we’re necessarily right to think of things in this way, but I don’t think we are capable of thinking of it in any other way. Of course, some of us believe death is not the end – just a transition to a new form of existence, an afterlife. Who knows? They may be right. But I am not concerned with this issue. I’m concerned with whether the end of us is a bad thing – for the person whose end it is. And it doesn’t matter how or when that end takes place. If you believe in any afterlife, then you probably believe in souls and God. And God, since He is omnipotent, can destroy souls. If God were to do that to you, it would, presumably, be the end of you. If so, would that be a bad thing – a bad thing for you? That is the question in which I am interested. It is the relation between us and our ends that is crucial – whatever forms those ends take.

Suppose the story I have told is true: humans do lose more when they die – or when they meet their end, whatever it is – than other animals. Death is a greater tragedy when it happens to a human than when it happens to a wolf. The mistake is to think that it follows from this that human lives are superior. That we lose more when we die is not an indication of our superiority; on the contrary, it is a clue to our damnation. The reason is that embodied in this account of death is a certain conception of time. And embodied in this conception of time is a vision of life’s meaning.

The conception of time underlying the account of death I have presented is a familiar one: time’s arrow. The future is something we actually – and not merely possibly – have now, at the present time (whatever that means). And we have a future because we actually have – now – states that direct us towards that future: desires, goals, projects. Imagine these as arrows streaking into the future. Some of these arrows direct us into the future only implicitly: it takes time for them to reach their mark. To satisfy a desire, you have to survive long enough for the arrow of that desire to reach its mark. The desires of wolves and dogs are like this. However, some arrows are different. Some arrows are burning ones streaking out into the dark night of the future, and lighting up that future for us. Corresponding to these arrows are human desires, goals and projects that direct us towards the future explicitly by way of an overt conception of how that future is to be. Death harms any creature by cutting off the arrow of its desires in their flight. But death harms most those creatures whose arrows are burning ones.

It is by way of these sorts of metaphors that we humans try to understand time. We think of time as an arrow whose flight carries it from the past, through the present, into the future. Alternatively, we might think of time as a river flowing from the past to the future. Or we might think of it as a ship sailing from the past, passing through the present and heading into a distant and unknown future. We are caught up in this flow of time because we are temporal beings. Like other animals, the arrows of our desires pull us into, and allow us to hook on to, this temporal stream. And unlike other animals, our arrows can, to some extent, light up this stream – making it something to be seen, understood and perhaps shaped.

These are, of course, all metaphors. They are only metaphors. What’s more, they are all spatial metaphors. As Kant, among many others, noticed, whenever we try to understand time, we always seem to be pushed back to an analogy with space. More than that, however, these metaphors bring with them a certain conception of what is important in life: a certain conception of life’s meaning.

The metaphors suggest a view of life’s meaning as something towards which we must aim; or as a direction in which we must travel. The present is forever slipping away – the arrow of time constantly passing through one location on its way to the next. So, if the meaning of life is tied to moments, that meaning is also constantly slipping away. The meaning of our life, we think, must be tied to – must be a function of – our desires, goals and projects. The meaning of life is something towards which we can progress; something to be achieved. And as with all important achievements, this is not something that can happen now but only further on down the line.

However, we also know that further on down the line is to be found not meaning but its absence. If we follow the line far enough, we find not meaning but death and decay. We come to the point where all our arrows are cut off in their flight. We find the end of meaning. We are, each one of us, being-towards-a-future; and in this is to be found the possibility of our life having meaning. But we are also being-towards-death. The arrow of time is both our salvation and our damnation, and so we find ourselves both drawn to and repelled by this arrow’s path. We are meaning-giving creatures – our lives have a meaning that, we think, the lives of other animals cannot have. We are death-bound beings, the beings who track death in a way that, we think, no other animal can. Both the meaning of our lives and the end of our lives are to be found somewhere further on down the line. The line, therefore, both fascinates us and horrifies us. This, fundamentally, is the existential predicament of human beings.

6

Quoth Edgar Allan Poe’s raven: nevermore. Perhaps nevermore is a concept possessed by ravens. It is not, I suspect, one possessed by dogs. Nina loved Brenin. She grew up with him from the time she was a puppy. And she wanted to spend every waking second with him. True, by the time we got to France, perhaps even London, Brenin was nowhere near as interesting to her as Tess. Nina’s interest in other dogs, or wolves, was a function of how much they would wrestle with her. And, by France, Brenin didn’t really enjoy the rough and tumble any more. Nonetheless, she was always very affectionate towards him, greeting him with a big lick on the nose whenever she hadn’t seen him for more than an hour or so.

So I was somewhat surprised when I brought Brenin’s body back from the vet. Nina gave him a perfunctory sniff and then turned her attention to the apparently far more interesting business of playing with Tess. Brenin wasn’t there any more: I’m pretty sure Nina understood that. I’m also pretty sure she couldn’t grasp that Brenin would be there again nevermore.

We humans tend to suppose that this is evidence of a fundamental inferiority in animal intelligence. Animals cannot comprehend death; only humans can do that. Therefore we are better than they are. Once, I bought this. Now I suspect the inference goes the other way.

Suppose I were to take you to the same beach every day for a year, following the same path and doing the same things. After that I take you each day to the same boulangerie, where I buy you a pain au chocolat – not a beignet framboise, not a croissant but a pain au chocolat. Pretty soon, I am sure, you would be telling me: what, another pain au chocolat! Couldn’t you have got me something else? Just for once? I’m sick of bloody pains au chocolat!

That is how it is with us humans. We think of the time of our lives as a line; and we have a very ambivalent attitude towards that line. The arrows of our desires, and our goals and our projects, bind us to this line, and therein do we find the possibility of our lives having meaning. But the line also points to the death that will take this meaning away. And so we are simultaneously attracted to and disgusted by this line, both drawn to and terrified of it. It is our fear of the line that makes us always want what is different. When our jaws close on the pain au chocolat, we can’t help but see all the other pains au chocolat dotted out along the line, forwards and backwards. We can never enjoy the moment for what it is in itself because for us the moment is never what it is in itself. The moment is endlessly deferred both forwards and backwards. What counts as now for us is constituted by our memories of what has gone before and our expectations of things yet to come. And this is equivalent to saying that for us there is no now. The moment of the present is deferred, distributed through time: the moment is unreal. The moment always escapes us. And so for us the meaning of life can never lie in the moment.

Of course, we love our routines and rituals, some of us. But we also crave what is different. You should have seen the looks on the faces of my three canines when I started dividing up the pains au chocolat each morning. The quivering anticipation, the rivers of saliva, the concentration so intense it almost bordered on the painful. As far as they were concerned, it could be pains au chocolat from here to eternity. For them, the moment their jaws closed on the pain au chocolat was complete in itself, unadulterated by any other possible moments spread out through time. It could be neither augmented nor diminished by what had gone before and what was yet to come. For us, no moment is ever complete in itself. Every moment is adulterated, tainted by what we remember has been and what we anticipate will be. In each moment of our lives, the arrow of time holds us green and dying. And this is why we think we are superior to all other animals.

Nietzsche once talked of eternal recurrence, or the eternal return of the same. There are two different – but mutually compatible – ways of interpreting Nietzsche. At the very least, Nietzsche flirted with one of those ways; and he whole-heartedly endorsed the other. We might call the first the metaphysical interpretation of the eternal return. In this context, the word ‘metaphysical’ means a description of how things really are. So to understand the eternal return as a metaphysical doctrine is to think that it describes something that is actually going to happen – or, for that matter, has already happened – an infinite number of times. If you think that the universe is made up of only a finite number of particles – atoms or sub-atomic particles – then these particles can enter into only a finite number of combinations. Nietzsche actually thought of the universe as composed of a finite number of quanta or packets of power; but since these were capable of combination and recombination, the essential point remains the same. If you also think that time is infinite, it follows that the same combinations of particles or power quanta must recur. In fact, they must recur over and over again. But you, and the world around you, and the events that have made up your life, are just, ultimately, combinations of particles. So, it seems, you, your world and your life must recur over and over again. If time is infinite, then you must recur eternally.

This way of thinking about eternal recurrence is questionable, relying on the assumptions that the universe is finite and time is infinite. If you deny this – if, for example, you think that time is created with the creation of the universe and dies with that same universe – then the argument will not work. Nietzsche flirted with this interpretation of the eternal return, but never explicitly endorsed it in his published work.

What he did endorse in his published work was what we might call the existential interpretation of the eternal return. On this interpretation, the idea of eternal recurrence provides us with a sort of existential test. In his book The Joyful Wisdom, Nietzsche describes the test like this:

Here the eternal return is not presented as a description of the way the world is, but something you should ask yourself if you want to understand both how your life is going and what sort of person you are. First of all, as Nietzsche puts it, all joy wants eternity. If your life is going well, you will be far more inclined to embrace the idea that your life will be repeated over and over again. If your life is not going well, on the other hand, you will probably regard the idea with horror. That much is obvious rather than deep. What is less obvious, perhaps, is how you react to the information imparted by the demon.

Suppose someone were to ask you: with whom do you want to spend eternity? Coincidentally, that might have been the question on the lips of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who made the mistake of knocking on the door at Knockduff many years ago. Brenin and Nina were with me in the back garden and charged around to the front door to see who was there. When I got around there I found one of the Witnesses with his face to the wall, crying, while Brenin and Nina sniffed him, concerned expressions on their faces. I never did get to find out what they were going to ask me that day – they quickly excused themselves. But we naturally understand the question, ‘With whom do you want to spend eternity?’ as a religious one. Eternity is the afterlife and this, for all intents and purposes, is just a continuation of the line of our lives beyond the demise of our physical bodies. What we sometimes overlook in this picture is the one person you are unable to avoid in this eternity: you. The question religion then offers us is: are you sure you are a person with whom you would want to spend eternity? And this is a good question.

Nietzsche, however, makes the question far more urgent. If eternity is a continuation of the line of our lives, then whatever existential progress you make in this life you can continue on into the next. If life is a soul-making journey – a soul-making theodicy – then this journey can continue after the demise of your body. But suppose this life is it. Suppose your life is not a line. Suppose time is a circle and your life will be repeated over and over again, eternally recurring in the manner described by Nietzsche’s demon. You are still the person with whom you are going to have to spend eternity. But eternity is now a circle and not a line, and so you have no further opportunity to improve or perfect yourself. Whatever you do you must do now.

If you are strong, Nietzsche thought, you will do what you feel you must do now. If, as he put it, your life and spirit are in the ascendant, then you will want to make yourself now the sort of person with whom you would want to spend eternity. But if you are weak, if your spirit is in decline – if you are tired – you will take refuge in deferral: in the idea that you can always do what you have to do later, in the life that is yet to come. The eternal return, then, is a way of judging whether you are a spirit in the ascendant or a spirit in decline. This is what I mean by saying that it is an existential test.

However, there is one more thing that the idea of the eternal return does, and I think it is the most important: it undermines the conception of life’s meaning that is implied by the conception of time as a line. When we think of time as a line, we naturally think of the meaning of life as something towards which we must aim – as something to be achieved further on down the line. Each moment is always slipping away and so the meaning of life cannot be found in the moment. More than that, the significance of each moment derives from its place on the line: its significance consists in how it relates to what has gone before, which still exists in the form of memory, and what is yet to come, which exists in the form of anticipation. Each moment always carries the taint of the ghosts of past and future. Therefore, no moment is complete in itself – the content and meaning of every moment is deferred and distributed along the line of time’s arrow.

But if time is a circle rather than a line, if one’s life is destined to repeat itself over and over again without end, then the meaning of life cannot consist in progression towards some decisive point on the line. There is no such point because there is no such line. Moments do not slip away – on the contrary, they reassert themselves over and over again without end. The significance of each moment does not derive from its place on a line – on how it relates what comes before it on the line to what comes after. It does not carry the taint of past and future ghosts. Each moment is what it is; each moment is complete and entire in itself.

Now the meaning of life is quite different. Instead of being found at some or other decisive point on the line, or decisive portion of the line, the meaning of life is found in moments: not all moments – to be sure – just some of them. The meaning of one’s life can be scattered through that life, like grains of barley scattered across the fields of Knockduff at harvest time. The meaning of life can be found in its highest moments. Each of these moments is complete in itself and requires no further moments for its significance or justification.

One thing I learned from the last year of Brenin’s life is that wolves, and dogs for that matter, pass Nietzsche’s existential test in a way that humans rarely do. A human would have said, ‘Not the same old walk again today. Couldn’t we go somewhere different for a change? I’m sick of the beach. And don’t get me another pain au chocolat – I feel like I’m turning into one!’ And so on and so forth. Alternately fascinated and repelled by time’s arrow, our repulsion causes us to seek happiness in what is new and different, in any deviation from time’s arrow. But our fascination with the arrow means that any deviation from the arrow’s line simply creates a new line, and our happiness now requires that we deviate from this line too. The human search for happiness is, accordingly, regressive and futile. And at the end of every line is only nevermore. Nevermore to feel the sun on your face. Nevermore to see the smile on the lips of the one you love, or the twinkling in their eyes. Our conception of our lives and the meaning of those lives is organized around a vision of loss. No wonder time’s arrow horrifies as well as fascinates us. No wonder we try to find our happiness in the new and unusual – in any deviation, no matter how small, from the arrow’s path. Our rebellion may be nothing more than a futile spasm, but it is certainly understandable. Our understanding of time is our damnation. Wittgenstein was wrong, subtly but decisively. Death is not the limit of my life. Always, I have carried my death with me.

The time of wolves, I suspect, is a circle, not a line. Each moment of their lives is complete in itself. And happiness, for them, is always found in the eternal return of the same. If time is a circle, there is no nevermore. And, accordingly, one’s existence is not organized around the vision of life as a process of loss. The regularity and repetition in our lives, during Brenin’s last year, afforded me a fleeting and indistinct glimpse of the eternal return of the same. Where there is no sense of nevermore, there is no sense of loss. For a wolf or dog, death really is the limit of a life. And for this reason death has no dominion over them. This, I would like to think, is what it is to be a wolf or a dog.

I understand now why Nina gave Brenin’s body only a perfunctory sniff, even though she loved him perhaps more than anything in the world. Of all of us, Nina understood time best. Nina was the keeper of time – the zealous guardian of the eternal return of the same. Every day, she knew exactly when it was 6 a.m. and I should drag myself out of bed to start work. Every day, she knew to the second when it was 10 a.m., and she would put her head in my lap to tell me that it was time to stop writing; that it was time to go to the beach. She knew when it was time to leave the beach to get to the boulangerie before it closed for lunch. Every day – whether it was standard or summer time, she knew exactly when it was 7 p.m. and their dinner should be presented, and then when it was time to walk to La Réunion for dessert. It was Nina’s lifelong mission to preserve and guarantee the eternal return of the same. For her nothing could change; nothing could be different. She understood that real happiness lies only in what is the same, what is unchanging; what is eternal and immutable. Nina understood that it is the structure that is real, not the contingencies. She understood that all joy wants eternity; that if you have said yes to one moment you have said yes to them all. Her life was testament to the irrelevance of nevermore.