The title of this post was one of David Foster Wallace’s favorite phrases. He said it quite a few times in his various writings, always attributing it to others.
This evening I saw the Pinter play Old Times on Broadway, and was struck by how literally it adheres to this dictum. Three characters circle around each other in an intense yet abstracted emotional space, talking elliptically about their entangled romantic history.
It is very much a ghost story: Everything these characters are now is rooted in events that happened between them twenty years before — passion, betrayal, youthful intrigue.
The thought makes me think of old loves that I have had, and lost. The actual people are physically existent, on this planet, living their lives. But to me they are in some way ghosts, walking spectres of another person who was so very real and important in my life.
A lost love can seem as refracted and ephemeral as some ghostly vision spotted in a country graveyard on a moonless night. And it may be our fate, with the passage of time, to become each others’ ghosts.
Every love story is a ghost story.
Two comments:
(1) This post really hit me & I suspect will stay with me. “Every love story is a ghost story” is such a sharp distillation and evocation of love lost.
(2) You have 10 posts with “ghost” in the title!