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you bastard! ). The news affected him so profoundly that he spent his childhood in the presence of eternal nonexistence and terrible infinity. In adulthood, he remains much more death-haunted than me; also, liable to much deeper depressions. There are nine basic criteria for a Major Depressive Episode (from Depressed Mood Most of the Day, via Insomnia and Feelings of Worthlessness, up to Recurrent Thoughts of Death and Recurrent Suicidal Ideation). Hosting any five over a two-week period is sufficient for a diagnosis of depression. About a decade ago, G. checked himself into hospital after managing to score a full nine out of nine. He told me this story without any competitive edge (I have long stopped competing with him), though with a certain sense of grim triumph.
    Every thanatophobe needs the temporary comfort of a worstcase exemplar. I have G., he has Rachmaninov, a man both terrified of death, and terrified that there might be survival after it; a composer who worked the Dies Irae into his music more times than anyone else; a cinema-goer who ran gibbering from the hall during the opening graveyard scene of Frankenstein. Rachmaninov only surprised his friends when he didn’t want to talk about death. A typical occasion: in 1915, he went to visit the poet Marietta Shaginyan and her mother. First he asked the mother to tell his fortune at cards, in order (of course) to find out how much longer he had to live. Then he settled down to talk to the daughter about death: his chosen text that day being a short story by Artsybashev. There was a dish of salted pistachio nuts to hand. Rachmaninov ate a mouthful, talked about death, shifted his chair to get nearer the bowl, ate another mouthful, talked about death. Suddenly, he broke off and laughed. “The pistachio nuts have made my fear go away. Do you know where to?” Neither the poet nor her mother could answer this question; but when Rachmaninov left for Moscow, they gave him a whole sack of nuts for the journey “to cure his fear of death.”
    If G. and I were playing Russian composers, I would match (or raise) his bet with Shostakovich, a greater composer and just as much of a brooder on death. “We should think more about it,” he said, “and accustom ourselves to the thought of death. We can’t allow the fear of death to creep up on us unexpectedly. We have to make the fear familiar, and one way is to write about it. I don’t think writing and thinking about death is characteristic only of old men. I think that if people began thinking about death sooner, they’d make fewer foolish mistakes.”
    He also said: “Fear of death may be the most intense emotion of all. I sometimes think that there is no deeper feeling.” These views were not publicly expressed. Shostakovich knew that death—unless it came in the form of heroic martyrdom—was not an appropriate subject for Soviet art, that it was “tantamount to wiping your nose on your sleeve in company.” He could not have the Dies Irae blaze from his scores; he had to be musically covert. But increasingly, the cautious composer found the courage to draw his sleeve across his nostrils, especially in his chamber music. His last works often contain long, slow, meditative invocations of mortality. The violist of the Beethoven Quartet was once given the following advice about the first movement of the fifteenth quartet by its composer: “Play it so that the flies drop dead in mid-air.”
    When my friend R. talked about death on Desert Island Discs , the police took away his shotgun. When I did so, I received various letters pointing out that my fears would be cured if I looked within, opened myself up to faith, went to church, learnt to pray, and so on. The theological bowl of pistachio nuts. My correspondents weren’t exactly patronizing—some were soppy, some were stern—but they did seem to imply that this solution might come as news to me. As if I were a member of some rainforest tribe (not that I wouldn’t