Nothing to Be Frightened Of

Erudite and full of pith, Barnes begins his disquisition on family and death with perhaps the most to-the-bone statement felt but never uttered by every atheist: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.” Encapsulated in those nine words is the gist of the Barnes metaphysics—he considers himself too rational to believe in a higher power but too romantic not to pine for one.

Barnes, in his sixties and an avowed agnostic, finds himself confronting his fear of dying by looking back through his family tree and turning those he considers his intellectual ancestors, like French author Jules Renard, who once famously wrote, “I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t.”

Barnes would prefer you to think that his book is not a memoir, but the most riveting parts pick through his family history. His mother, a Daily Worker–reading communist, scoffed at the idea of God, and his gentle father never raised an opinion one way or another. His brother, a philosopher, finds Barnes’s preoccupation soporific and tells him so in the brutal and hilarious language that only a philosopher-brother could employ. When Barnes asks his brother what he thinks of his quip about missing God, he replies with one word: “Soppy.”

For much of Frightened, Barnes digs through the writings of his “real family,” various authors, thinkers and painters who weighed these issues with as heavy a heart as he. And while Barnes always writes with a sharp sense of humor, none of these passages sings in quite the way the ones about his biological family do. He writes about being a young man and kicking a large, leather cushion, only to have it rip and reveal that it was stuffed with the love letters from his parents’ courtship. That single image says more than many of those philosophers Barnes admires so much and convinces us that he should stop being an agnostic about whether he wrote a memoir.

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