PHILIP LARKIN was one of the great metaphysical poets of the second half of the 20th century. It is fitting that his last poem before a long silence — Aubade — should have been about death.

More precisely, it was about the impossibility of knowing how to think about death in a secular society in which religion — “That moth-eaten musical brocade/ Created to pretend we never die” — has lost its authority, so that death is, for most of us, not a gateway but a terminus. There is neither comfort nor consolation. It’s no use being brave: “Death is no different whined at than withstood.”

Like Larkin, many of us are at a loss as to how to deal with the knowledge that we are all accidents waiting to unhappen. Given that we can only postpone, but not cancel, the appointment in Samarra, avoiding it as long as possible through prudence and denying its certainty might seem to be the wisest strategy. But, of course, prudence sooner or later fails us and denial cannot be sustained. The inevitability of death is born upon us daily: the deaths of strangers, the deaths of the famous, and the deaths of those close to us. We can suppress awareness of death only at the price of shallowness. And so we have to deal with it. But how? This question is to be addressed at the Battle of Ideas next weekend in a session entitled “Morbid Fascination — our obsession with death”. It seems more pressing because of the apparent lifting of a taboo on discussion of death in our society.

Fatal disease occupies an ever- expanding place in the collective consciousness, as reflected in the media. As Tiffany Jenkins, a writer currently researching changing attitudes to human remains, has noted: “TV ‘events’ screen live autopsies, documentaries focus on how people die and the deaths of public figures and children fill our screens and newspapers.” Living wills, the arguments for assisted dying and euthanasia and the need to improve palliative care services occupy air-time and column inches. This may well be a positive development, in so far as it reflects a realistic attitude towards death, and may make the experience of those who are dying or losing those they love less solitary. And anything that promotes a more rational and humane approach to medical treatment at the end of life must be a good thing.

But, as Jenkins asks, does it also express a “morbid voyeurism”? Is there an element of trivialising, and hence distasteful, sensationalism? Is too much of the discussion and representation of death caught up in secondary things, such as the desire to shock that characterises so much of what passes for art in contemporary life? What is a healthy interest in death? To answer this, I think we have to separate a preoccupation with the processes of dying — which, unless it is motivated by a desire to give comfort and alleviate suffering, is indeed morbid — from awareness of our finitude; the physical from the metaphysical aspects of death.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger defined “authentic” human being as a permanent state of “being-towards-death”. While this seems impossibly austere, not to say incompatible with functioning effectively in everyday life, an awareness of the fragility and transience of life may make us less petty. It is a salutary experience to imagine the world uninhabited by one’s self: to think of one’s self being neither here, nor there, nor elsewhere, nor anywhere. The thought of the nothingness that lies ahead makes all the more remarkable and precious the something that one is; and the same goes for those with whom one shares one’s life.

Paradoxically, the sense that one day all one’s purposes will converge to purposelessness and all mattering be resorbed back into matter may be an inspiration to creativity, if only as a spur to doing something that will outlast one’s life, albeit only for a little while.

Intimations of mortality motivate artists and philosophers. As Tolstoy said, whatever artists are thinking of, they are always thinking of their death. And it is the need to make sense of finitude that drives philosophers to try to encompass the world in their thoughts, and by this means to see round it and, if only temporarily, to grasp the world that has us in its grasp. As for the rest of us, we might become less small-minded and wake out of the narrow parish of consciousness that is normal wakefulness.

If we separate thoughts of death from preoccupation with the process of dying — and even from complaints about the NHS (however valid) — its darkness may illuminate our lives, its shadows making our daylight seem brighter. Lucem demonstrat umbra — the darkness shows forth the light. Or, as E. M. Forster said, while death destroys a man, the idea of death saves him. The difficulty is to hold the idea in mind, to bring this “small unfocused blur”, “just on the edge of vision”, as Larkin described it, into focus and to the centre of our vision.

Another’s death may, for this reason, sometimes bring something in addition to grief, unbearable loss, and pity and sadness at a life that has been cancelled. This something else is captured by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “But, as you went, a segment of reality/ flashed in upon our stage by that same crevice/ through which you passed: the green of real verdure/ the real sunshine and the real wood.”

For a while, the fear of death is transformed into wonder at life and greater love for the beauty, richness and complexity of the world and of those with whom we share it.

Raymond Tallis will be speaking at the Battle of Ideas, organised by the Institute of Ideas with The Times, which takes place at the Royal College of Art, London, on October 28-29. Ten pairs of free tickets are available to the first to e-mail custserv@the-times.co.uk

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