Member-only story
The Ghosts
A short story
“One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted -
One need not be a House -
The Brain has Corridors — surpassing
Material Place -”
― Emily Dickinson
Who knows what is the truth and what is reality? There are millions of little ‘I’s in their small worlds under the yellow sun, everyone with their own troubles, pain, joy, laughter… as big as the sky, as small as a grain of dust. Most of them, however, live ghostly lives in the world of ghosts. They are helplessly reaching out to connect with each other, but ghostly transparent hands pass through the ghostly transparent bodies… in vain. Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas.
We go on, marching through history, walking side by side with Apollo, upstream and downstream along the River Styx, climbing Helicon or watching another Helicon, ashamed of human evil, disappear underground.
And we walk on, Attila the Hun dies and lives, all of them… ghosts of the past follow us… dead languages… dead nations. We ride Pegasus, follow Hercules, watch Achilles’ death, stop before the Titan, sigh before Endymion, reach out toward Aphrodite, tremble before Hades, look uneasily at Atlas, avert our eyes from the Cyclops…
Three hundred million suns are born in our eyes, and three hundred million darknesses die with us.
