[Image: “Are You Santa Claus (c. 1900),” a postcard uploaded to Flickr by user “pellethepoet.” (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!)]
From whiskey river (which this week pulled a handful of favorites from Hallowe’ens gone by):
Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on.
(Marilynne Robinson [source])
…and:
14 rue Serpentine: a Paris Notebook
(excerpt)14.
So the dead are among us again
even here where Halloween is not celebrated
and the moon flies through the skeletons of trees
and men in rowboats fish for souls on the river
There is a woman with spidery hair swinging a lantern
disappearing down the colonnade
a row of buildings tilted like gravestones
in which a single window is lit
a wall from whose depths shadows emerge
assuming the contours of bodies they will follow
all night and abandon at dawn:
a revelation to you
that each day we take on a new shadow
(Nicholas Christopher [source])
…and:
There was a time when the coming of this night meant something. A dark Europe, groaning in superstitious fear, dedicated this Eve to the grinning Unknown. A million doors had once been barred against the evil visitants, a million prayers mumbled, a million candles lit. There was something majestic about the idea.
(Robert Bloch [source: none canonical, but I found the story reproduced here])
…and:
Ghost Stories
In the back yard
the heavy frost lies
exactly in the shape of
the shadow of the house,
minute by minute disappearing
as the earth spins.Who would live in such a
frosted house of shadows?
Ghosts turned silver with age.
They come and go with
the rising of the sun,
the turning of the seasons.In summer I think they
live in the dew at the edge
of deep woods where the
last pasture touches
the first trees.Sometimes they slip in among
the hickories and beech,
darkening into silhouettes.
It is hard to walk in the woods
without stepping on them:
what you think is the spongy floor
of the forest is their dark bodies
lying all in one direction,
circling the trees they cling to,
always rooted somehow
wherever they choose to lie down.All the stories are true.
(Grace Butcher [source])
Not from whiskey river:
A Ghost Abandons the Haunted
You ignore the way light filters through my cells,
the way I have of fading out—still
there is a constant tug, a stretching,
what is left of me is coming loose. Soon,I will be only crumbs of popcorn,
a blue ring in the tub, an empty
toilet paper roll, black mold
misted on old sponges,strands of hair woven into
carpet, a warped door
that won’t open, the soft spot
in an avocado, celery, a pear,a metallic taste in the beer, a cold sore
on your lip—and when I finally lose my hold
you will hear a rustle and watch me spill
grains of rice across the cracked tile.
(Katie Cappello [source])
…and:
The paleontologist Teilhard carried a notebook in which he had written, among other things, a morning prayer: “Be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day the world is to be freshly clothed.”
The realm of loose spirit never interested Teilhard. He did not believe in it. He never bought the view that the world was illusion and spirit alone was real. He had written in his notebook from a folding stool in the desert of the Ordos, “There are only beings, everywhere.”
(Annie Dillard [source])
…and:
“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
Really? [said Death.] As if it was some kind of pink pill? No. Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
Yes. As practice. You have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
Yes. Justice. Mercy. Duty. That sort of thing.
“They’re not the same at all!”
You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet— Death waved a hand. and yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some…some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
My point exactly.
(Terry Pratchett [source])
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