The Floating Library

Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?

What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.

List!  List!  O list!

I am the ghost of Doctor Sineokov.

Am I a father? If I were?

Everything in this library I have plagiarized with great diligence and care for your (well, mostly my) reading pleasure.

Shrunken uncertain hand.

I have made no effort to contact the various copyright holders to obtain permission to reprint these selections, etc.

But that has been explained, I believe, by jurists.

So sue me.  (Please don’t.)

Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit…

He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by Elsinore’s rocks or what you will, the sea’s voice, a voice heard only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son consubstantial with the father.

Buzz. Buzz.

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Whither away? Exploitable ground.

As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of the imagination, when the mind, Shelly says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.

Why is that, I wonder, or does it mean something perhaps?

.

“How I wish I could stop, be finished finally, but with a metaphorical survival, be it the page of a book, a single tress of loose hair…” — Bernardo Soares

.

What is a ghost?
A tragedy doomed to repeat itself time and again?
An instant of pain, perhaps.
Something dead which still seems to be alive.
An emotion suspended in time.
Like a blurred photograph.
Like an insect trapped in amber.

A ghost.
That’s what I am.