Waiting for the Last Bus

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Richard Holloway. Waiting for the Last Bus

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Richard Holloway was Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church. A former Gresham Professor of Divinity and Chairman of the Joint Board of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Leaving Alexandria won the PEN/Ackerley Prize and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. Holloway has written for many newspapers in Britain, including The Times, Guardian, Observer, Herald and Scotsman. He has also presented many series for BBC television and radio; Waiting for the Last Bus originated as a five-part series on Radio 4 in 2016.

Let God Arise (1972)

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If an experience has been developed into a myth like that, it is because its theme is universal. It expresses a reality that troubles the human community. This one suggests that we’d be better blind than obsessed with how we look, because it’s a compulsion that can never be fully satisfied or appeased. Freud took the story further and coined the term narcissism for anyone suffering from an overpowering degree of self-esteem, a condition he diagnosed as a form of emotional immaturity. It is captured in the caricature of the egotist, usually a dominant male, who pauses in his narrative of self-glorification only long enough to say to his listener: ‘But enough from me; tell me how you rate my accomplishments?’ Narcissism in both its classic and Freudian forms has become a prevalent disease in late-modern societies obsessed with image and the screen technologies that promote it. It supplies the energy for one of the main enterprises of modern capitalism, the Anti-Ageing and Postponement of Death industry, what we might call the AAPD complex. We spend fortunes delaying death and the physical dissolution that precedes it.

And it starts early, with our revolt against the reality of the bodies we were born with. Had I been born sixty years later, would I have saved up for hair-transplant surgery rather than wasting my money on those wee sweeties advertised in Church Illustrated? And would I have missed learning one of the best lessons life teaches: that it is better to accept reality rather than deny it, including the reality of our own bodies and the death that is their only end? Throughout most of history, humans had no alternative but to accept these certainties. In our advanced technological society, that is no longer the case. We spend fortunes trying to refashion our bodies and postpone our deaths. And it is easy to understand why. Anguish is a hard thing to bear, even if it is only the anguish of not liking the way we look. The anguish of dying is harder still, especially if it comes before we are ready for it, and we feel cheated of the time we thought we had left.

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