Writers’ Pantry #44: Of Death and Ghosts in Books

Sunday greetings, my dear poets and storytellers. I hope you and yours are doing well. I hope October wasn’t too insane for you. And I hope November brings better things to us all (in the case of the USA, I really hope that it brings a new President who isn’t despicable).

Speaking of despicable, I just finished rereading Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost and Other Stories. If you’ve read the title story, you might be thinking that I’m talking about the ghost when I use the word “despicable”. But no. I’m referring to the terrible kids who enjoy tormenting the ghost. The following quote tells us just how ready the ghost was to find some real rest, some peace:

“Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace.”

While on the subject of ghosts, one of the poetry podcasts I listen to shared “Haunted Houses”, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The following stanza—the strong imagery, the word usage—stayed with me, so I thought I should share it with you:

“There are more guests at table than the hosts
invited; the illuminated hall
is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts,
as silent as the pictures on the wall.”

And I could never write about ghosts in books without mentioning at least one ghost in one of my favorite books. The book in question—One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez—is actually full of ghost, but I shall only quote a short passage (Mostly, because the words are such a wonderful example of my favorite author’s magical realism, that not sharing it might be a crime in some nations. Really):

“It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía with impatience and made him wander all through the house even in broad daylight.”

I should probably stop boring you to tears with ghosts, and bring on the Pantry (I blame it on the lingering energies of the just gone Halloween and in the upcoming Dia de Muertos, which I plan to celebrate by stuffing my face with leftover pumpkin chili and a huge slice of skull cake). So, the Writers’ Pantry #44 is open. Let’s link poetry or prose. Let our contributions be old or new. One link per participant, please. And if you are going for prose, it should be 369 words or fewer.

- for the next Weekly Scribblings, our Rommy would like us to craft our words around the phrase: “eye of the hurricane”. We can choose to do this literally or figuratively.   

photo by Toa Heftiba, on Unsplash