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– that we on our short-lived planet are part of a universe simultaneously perfectly ordinary in that there it is and incalculably mysterious in that it is beyond our comprehension – does not feel like believing in nothing and would never make me recruit anyone for slaughter. It feels like a state of infinite possibility, stimulating and enjoyable – not exactly comforting, but acceptable because true. And this remains so when I force myself to think about the most alarming aspect of what I can understand, which is that we will eventually become extinct, differing from the dinosaurs only in contributing a good deal more than they did to our own fate. And it also remains so when I contemplate my personal extinction.
    I once had a favourite image for falling asleep which I used whengetting into bed felt particularly good. After waiting a minute or two before switching off my lamp, collecting awareness so that I would fully appreciate the embrace of darkness, I turned face downwards, sprawled my arms and legs, and my bed became a raft which floated me out onto the sea of night. It produced a sensation of luxury, the more seductive for being enlivened by an almost imperceptible thread of risk.
    Once we at André Deutsch brought out a coffee-table book about beds prefaced by an oddly inappropriate essay by Anthony Burgess. The book was supposed to be in praise of beds, but Burgess said he loathed them because he was afraid of going to sleep and needed to outwit his fear by letting sleep catch him unexpectedly in a chair or on the floor. Lying down on a bed, he felt, was like lying down on a bier from which, if he lost consciousness, he might never get up. (I did question this preface, but André’s view was that no one bothered to read prefaces, what mattered was having the man’s name on the book, not what he said – a bit of publisher-think which I deplored, but not strongly enough to make a stand.) I have read of people undergoing many things worse than this quirk of Burgess’s, but of no ordeal that was harder for me to imagine sharing. Being forced to deny oneself one of the greatest pleasures of everyday life, the natural seal of happiness, the sure escape from sorrow or boredom, the domestication of mystery … What an affliction! Could the poor man really have been so savagely haunted by the fear of death? From which it may correctly be deduced that I myself have never been enough troubled by it to want to envisage an afterlife.
    What explains irreligiosity? Lack of imagination? Courage? A genetically bestowed pattern of temperament? The first two occur in the religious as well as the irreligious, and the third only shunts the question back through the generations. Religious people of limited intelligence often think that the explanation is licentiousness, a naughty refusal to accept restraints; but many an unbeliever is as scrupulous as any religious person in acknowledging the restrictions and obligations laid on us by sharing the world with others. To the irreligious person the answer seems simple enough, though embarrassing to pronounce: he is more intelligent than his religious brother. But his religious brother sees with equal clarity that the opposite is true, and where is the neutral referee? We must settle, I suppose, for there being in this respect two kinds of person.
    My kind enjoys an unfair advantage. In the Western world there are probably nowadays as many people without the religious instinct as with it, but all of them live in societies which developed on lines laid down by believers: everywhere on earth men started by conjuring Powers into being to whom they could turn for direction and control of their behaviour. The mechanism was obviously a necessary one in its time. So we, the irreligious, live within social structures built by the religious, and however critical or resentful we may be of parts of them, no honest atheist would deny that in so far as the saner aspects