Crace is not afraid to describe the fact that “they lived in tender bodies They were vulnerable They did not have the power not to die. They were, we are, all flesh, and then we are all meat.” These are facts we all pretend are not true every day.Yet Crace’s vision is as far from being bleak as anything can be. I do not think, for example, that we would live in such an insanely work-obsessed, money-fixated culture if we were more aware of the fact that our lives are limited and soon it will all come to an end.One of the few thinkers seriously to articulate a positive vision of godless death is the novelist Jim Crace, whose extraordinary 1999 work Being Dead outlines a positive but not supernatural understanding of death. Death has an excellent knack of forcing us to analyse our priorities.

This is, I think, a terrible mistake; it makes us live in unhealthy ways. The result is that we have never developed a post-religious understanding of death. As more and more people in Europe (although not in the States or the developing world, it has to be said) have lost faith in God, they have preferred simply to not think about death. I no more think that my grandfather still exists somewhere “up there” than I think my old pet hamster is running in some eternal, heavenly wheel. I think both of them were pieces of organic matter, the product of random historical accidents of evolution and chemistry. The Victorians could acknowledge death – and especially a level of child mortality that seems horrifying to us today – in part because most of them were certain of a heavenly afterlife.Like many people (the 39 per cent of Brits who are non-religious, for example) I believe that this view of death is comforting but false. We inject poisons into our faces so that we do not look like we are nearing death.

We only glance briefly (if at all) at the bodies of our dead relatives, and even then only after morticians have deoderized and rouged them into a semblance of life.Why did this happen? It is significant, I think, that the Grim Reaper disappeared from our lives at the same time as God. We hide the most likely candidates for greeting the Reaper – the old – away in residential homes, lest they mar our tidy, sanitised houses with death. We have swapped places with the Victorians: we are chilled about sex but freaked out by death. Our refusal to see or acknowledge death has had a dangerous, warping effect on the way we live. Ingmar Bergman wrote that “death is like the black backing of a mirror, without which we can see nothing” Today, we see nothing. To anyone living in another culture or even in our own just a few generations ago, this would have seemed incomprehensible.