“I almost think we’re all of us Ghosts. … It’s not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”

— Henrik Ibsen, from his play Ghosts, on his birthday.

Apropos of which, you’re invited to read my piece, Black Shirt with Pearl Buttons. Hemingway said that all stories end in death, and that the storyteller does the reader no good service by letting him overlook the fact. On the other hand, none of us wants to go out the way he did. The sun’s gonna shine in on this very chair, just hours hence. So maybe better to remember the awesome last lines of The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy, knowing that in time the right and godmade sun will rise, for all and without distinction.