Man’s craving for spirits

When I finished this book I asked myself why, considering its undoubted qualities, I found it so difficult and strenuous. Reading it, I felt like a man inching up a sheer rock-face. Sometimes I would get to the top and take a peek at the view. But then I’d come crashing down again, and wonder what it was I’d actually seen. But I didn’t give up. I got to the end, and lay down on my bed, and began to wonder what it was all about.

There were times when, briefly, I believed I had grasped what Marina Warner, the exceptionally well-informed author, was trying to tell me. But her subject is immensely difficult, at times impossible. The subject is phantasmagoria — or, more precisely, that which does not exist, but appears to. This, then, is a 400-page academic treatise on figments of the imagination. It is nothing less than a history of figments, an enormously difficult undertaking for any author. So hats off to her.

The book is large, and, over the two weeks that it lay on my bedside table, it appeared to grow even larger. Put in a nutshell, the story goes like this: in the olden days, people believed in spirits and ghosts and ghouls, and these days they still do. Modern technology, in fact, might be making us even more prone to believing in ghosts and spirits than we were in bygone times, although this is difficult to prove. I got the impression throughout that the author herself does not believe in ghosts, but might sometimes teeter on the edge.

So there you have it: ghosts probably don’t exist, but we keep wanting to believe they do — a profound truth, but, when it comes to it, a truth that’s very difficult to wrestle with in an academic sense.