QI The Book of the Dead

by Engels. Marx, suffering from a swollen liver, lost his wife in 1881 and his eldest daughter Jenny within a year. He died, heart-broken 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 organise his own finances, is long gone, his analysis is arguably more relevant than ever. Globalisation, 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 in2005 a shock result voted him the nation’s favourite 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 endeavours, 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 monetise the intellectual property rights.
    There is something oddly liberating about those who die with nothing. The French writer André 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?
     
     
    We have no reliable guarantee that the afterlife will be any less exasperating than this one, have we?
NOËL COWARD
     
    D eath 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 Programme completed at the end of the last millennium, almost 80 per cent of Americans claimed to believe in life after death. In Britain the figure was 56 per cent, 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 organised religion than the factthat most people, at some point in their lives, undergo a form of inexplicable experience that has traditionally been labelled ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’. These altered states, whether induced by drugs or meditation, intense emotional