The Book of the Dead

Society and an advocate of communistic principles. This man has not been loyal to the King.” More intimately, a Prussian spy who had seen his family life at firsthand concluded: “Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk.”

Engels and Marx conceived their history of capitalism, Das Kapital, in the late 1840s, but the first volume wasn’t completed until 1867, well behind schedule. Marx died before he could finish parts two and three. These had been written with the help of his daughter Eleanor (known as Tussy), who later played an important role in the early British Labor movement, and were completed and published posthumously by Engels. Marx, suffering from a swollen liver, lost his wife in 1881 and his eldest daughter, Jenny, within a year. He died, heartbroken and destitute, only two months later. Only eleven mourners attended his burial at Highgate cemetery, at which Engels delivered the funeral address. Although exasperated at times by Marx’s endless grumbling about his troubles and constant demands for money, Engels was his first and greatest admirer: “I simply cannot understand,” he wrote in 1881, “how anyone can be envious of genius; it’s something so very special that we who have not got it know it to be unattainable right from the start.”

Engels’s short speech to the little knot of people gathered at Highgate Cemetery on that Saturday in 1883 began: “On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think.” It ended: “His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.” He compared Marx to Darwin, saying that just as one discovered “the law of development of organic nature,” so the other discovered “the law of development of human history.” With the benefit of hindsight, surveying the wreckage of communism, it’s tempting to be dismissive. But though Marx the man, with his boils and his beer, the revolutionary who never led a revolution, the historian of capital who couldn’t organize his own finances, is long gone, his analysis is arguably more relevant than ever. Globalization, rapacious corporations, the decline of high culture, the triumph of consumerism—it’s all there in Marx. Almost no one today calls himself a Marxist (as Engels pointed out, neither did Marx), but we have all taken on board his ideas. In a British radio poll in 2005 a shocking number of listeners voted him the nation’s favorite thinker. Perhaps he did not, after all, discover the hidden laws of history, but his work—and his life—show that you can’t make sense of human existence without first understanding its economics.

It’s astonishing to think that the people who gave us electricity, space travel, and communism made no money from their endeavors, but there are plenty of innovators—equally eccentric, equally influential—who did and who still do. Fame and lasting importance are not commodities to be bought and sold, and there is no correlation between money (or the lack of it) and the value of a human life. More money, or better management of money, would not have saved Nelson from a sniper’s bullet. John Dee didn’t seek enlightenment to turn a profit, nor did Tesla conceive of a world network of wireless energy in order to monetize the intellectual property rights.

There is something oddly liberating about those who die with nothing. The French writer Andre Maurois captures it beautifully:

If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.

CHAPTER TEN Is That All There Is? St. Cuthbert—Ann Lee—William Blake—Jeremy Bentham—Richard Buckminster Fuller

We have no reliable guarantee that the afterlife will be any less exasperating than this one, have we?

NOEL COWARD

Death lies in wait for each of us, the full stop at the end of our story. All our strivings, our achievements, our catastrophes, the struggles with ourselves, our families, and our bodies are suddenly, mysteriously, over. It is the one unavoidable fact of our lives, yet most of us prefer to ignore it. Half the adults in Britain have not even made a will.

One of the oddest things about our attitude to death is that most of us still don’t think it is the end. In the International Social Survey Program completed at the end of the last millennium, almost 80 percent of Americans claimed to believe in life after death. In Britain the figure was 56 percent, and this was the same or higher in most European nations. Quite what form this life will take is unclear—in Ireland and Portugal more people believed in the existence of heaven than in life after death itself, which seems illogical—but despite the best efforts of militant atheists, the afterlife is an idea, however sketchy, that many of us refuse to let go.

This may have less to do with organized religion than the fact that most people, at some point in their lives, undergo a form of inexplicable experience that has traditionally been labeled “spiritual” or “religious.” These altered states, whether induced by drugs or meditation, intense emotional trauma or illness, all point us back to the mystery of consciousness itself. We don’t know where consciousness comes from, how it works, or why it appears to stop. The question of where we go once our bodies cease to function continues to intrigue us. Here are five lives dominated by the question What happens to us when we die?

St. Cuthbert (634–87) is the most famous saint of northern England. As well as having the gift of holy visions, he was a hermit, healer, and bishop of Lindisfarne. Most of what we know about him comes from the Venerable Bede (673–735), a fellow Northumbrian monk and author of the first major work of English history, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731). Bede’s Life and Miracles of St. Cuthbert was written in 721, only thirty-four years after the saint had died. It includes many firsthand accounts by people who had known Cuthbert well. Though studded with improbable mystic occurrences, it has a historical immediacy that the lives of many other medieval saints lack.

Cuthbert was a shepherd boy in the far north of the kingdom of Northumbria, near Dunbar. He walked with a limp, thanks to a painful tumor on his knee. All attempts to cure it failed and his condition grew so bad he was unable to walk. One day, as Cuthbert sat disconsolately outside his hut, a horseman pulled up beside him. He was dressed from head to toe in white. He examined the knee and instructed the boy to apply a poultice of wheat flour and milk. Cuthbert followed his instructions and was cured immediately. Only after the horseman had gone did he realize the stranger had been an angel. Deeply affected by this, Cuthbert returned to his work. He became increasingly devout. When five monks were swept out to sea while salmon fishing, he knelt on the shore, surrounded by people weeping and blaming the disaster on their sinful nature, and calmly prayed for a change of wind. To everyone’s amazement, the wind obeyed and the monks were saved. Soon after this, aged sixteen, he was watching over his sheep one night on the hillside, when he saw the soul of St. Aidan, the Irish monk and founder of the abbey at Lindisfarne, being carried up to heaven by angels. He didn’t know who Aidan was at that stage (and he certainly didn’t know that Aidan had died at that moment) but he knew he was a great man and wanted to follow him. The next day he abandoned his flock and became a novice at Melrose Abbey in the Scottish Borders. Many years later, he would succeed St. Aidan as Abbot of Lindisfarne.

Cuthbert was destined to become famous for his piety and for his miraculous gifts. Rather than spend time in the monastery, he chose to be an itinerant missionary, preaching and healing among the remote villages and hill farms of northern Britain. He founded a chapel at Dull in Perthshire and built a monastic cell in Fife, which eventually became the monastery out of which the University of St. Andrews was founded in 1413. Like St. Francis of Assisi, Cuthbert loved nature and had a particular affinity for wild animals. On one occasion, after spending the night up to his waist praying in the icy North Sea, he was visited by two otters, which first breathed on his frozen feet to warm them and then dried them off by tousling them with their furry backs. Another time, an eagle saved him from starvation by bringing him a fish, which he insisted on sharing with the kindly bird.

In 669 his wanderings came to an end when the Abbot of Melrose sent him on a special mission to Lindisfarne. He was given the task of persuading the monks there to accept the authority of Rome, as ordered by the Synod of Whitby in 664. The Synod was a major turning point in the early history of the British church. It marked