Living Ghosts

They are all around us

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

It comes with getting older, I suppose - thinking about the fragility of life, the loss of old friends, idols, and even my enemies and those who were some kind of annoyance. All the people who used to make up the life as I knew it.

During the last few years, I have seen many of the musicians and composers I enjoyed listening to pass away. And I have been thinking about how both music listening and book reading often becomes some kind of escape into the past. It may be so, even though I have not counted, that most of the music I listen to and the books I read are connected with people no longer among us.

Culture becomes a world of ghosts. A kind of worshiping of the dead. Every writer hopes to leave a legacy of books and thoughts behind for the future to enjoy - hopes to be remembered. To become such a ghost. And fears not to reach that, to be completely forgotten.

Before this makes me sad, I take a firm grip in myself and consider what it really means.

All the shelves full of books, written by writers no longer alive - edited, proofread, translated, illustrated, printed, distributed, sold and shipped by people who passed away long ago - are continuing the lives of all these valuable people. While still physical alive, they had other people around them who may or may not have appreciated their existence and what they did, but now, in their afterlife, they continue bringing joy to me and many others through what they did.

Mozart, Beethoven and all the other long gone classical composers are still alive as sources of inspiration for new composers, and as goal-setters for conductors and musicians, as well as the audiences of all times, of all places.

Buildings and statues, large engineering efforts such as the Suez or Panama canals, everything visible now and perhaps forever - some of it directly, like those canals, but a lot of other things as future moments of surprise and then insight for archeologists and historians. Inventions, designs, handicraft of all kinds, even a pair of shoes or a spoon, to be re-discovered in thousands of years and making people wonder.

All made by people no longer physically around but still contributing to the world in their deeds, representing their spirits.

Maybe less famous, maybe less recognizable for future historians, are the many small and big contributions to your life by the people who made you, raised you, helped you, and supported you. All the good and bad moments with them took part in shaping you. These people live forever through you, your memories of them, and what you do for others as a result.

You’ll live forever too. For all the same reasons. Having left a book or a musical composition is a visible sign that you have been there, but your inspiration to the world is shaping it and will forever become part of the social structure. The physical and social space you take up while alive will be empty when you leave, but not for long - it will give room for a world that will adapt to the shape of the room you created, leaving an eternal trace of the one unique person that was you - that is you, as your spirit this way remains part of the universe, forever taken into account and adapted to.

Manuel Göttsching is playing his minimalist guitar hypnosis through my loudspeakers just now, almost two years after he died. He lives in my music collection, as a regular inspiration. Walter Scott is patiently waiting for me to finish reading his book about Ivanhoe, and hundreds of other musicians and writers like them are similarly adding a mental input, a historical account, a philosophical angle to the lives of millions.

Sure, life is fragile, and our bodies do not live long. But our spirits live forever.