Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn's death had a strange effect on my today. I spent part of the day thinking about the eighty nine years of his life, about how that life inspired and perhaps compelled his literature. As a literary critic I am not qualified to comment on the body of work that is his legacy. I would not consider myself a fan. I often struggled through his work, but I read him, and I recognized the brilliance contained within those works.
I thought about all of those people in life who influence us in passing. They may touch us only very briefly, but they touch us. The memory of them resides within us somewhere. Sometimes we remember the actual person or the event. Other times I think it is more likely they attain a semi-mythic half remembered state. They become - images, icons, very specific memories, of very specific events. The moral of their story, the ghosts of the memories of them are always there, sometimes shrouded in light, sometimes in darkness, mostly in those swirling images of light and shadow that comprise all of us and the influences we have on each other.
I know there are others to whom I have been the shadowy ghost, the incident and accident of memory. I have had the pleasure of being told those stories a time or twenty in the course of my life. Indians are big story tellers and often we tell stories about - each other - it is often amusing and surprising the stories we occupy - stories of the things we did and failed to do, or failed at doing. I think it is good to be a ghost sometimes. It is good to have ghosts. It is good to have known ghosts.
After thinking about ghosts my thoughts turned to one of my favorite songs about a ghost...
Unknowing captor
You never know how much you
Pierce my spirit
But I can't touch you
Can you hear it
A cry to be free
Oh I'm forever under lock and key
As you pass through me...
Ghost, Indigo Girls
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