Laudator Temporis Acti

Howard Jacobson, Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 206-207:

I know what I want from a funeral. I want desolation. Howl, howl. If it truly doesn't matter whom we burn or bury next — for we are but a mote in Creation's eye — then that is all the more terrible for the dead and all the more desolating for those of us left standing. The end of a life, if we believe a life has meaning, is a dreadful event. The end of a life, if we believe a life has no meaning, is a more dreadful event still. Twist it how you like, death is neither decorous nor rational nor humane.

Then, after the desolation, should come that something else we feel for in the dark. Not comfort, not consolation, not even the peace that passeth all understanding. Something more like grandeur. At last, if we have been allowed to feel the enormity of a single lost life, there may follow a conviction of the grandeur of all lives. But nothing follows if we don't first find words for the magnitude of our despair.

And for this you need the psalms and liturgies of the great religions. Never mind what you think of religion the rest of the time — to hell with consistency — if you're going to die big, you have to die rocked in a religious vocabulary. I don’t want 'Ode to a Skylark' read over me, together with a snatch from Brahms's Clarinet Quintet and Humphrey Bogart saying play it again, Sam. I don't want to be lowered into the ground like a reluctant guest on Desert Island Discs, with my favourite book (other than Shakespeare) coming down after me. Leave me and my tastes out of it, I want the words of God.

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