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ARTS AND CULTURE

Ghosts of letters past

  • 03 October 2017

 

Last time I was in Athens I saw a ghost. Well, you expect such experiences in an ancient city, but this shade of a departed friend belonged far away in another country. Yet there he was in an Athenian street.

Even with his back turned to me, I knew him instantly. Slight build, skinny legs, T-shirt and long shorts, runners and a baseball cap. Even his gait was the same. Reason was nothing; impulse was all. And so I followed this figure for about three blocks, keeping at a discreet distance.

Of course the inevitable happened. The man eventually turned so that I saw his face, and thus realised he was nothing like my friend at all. I felt as if I'd been doused with icy water, even though the returned sweet voice of reason was whispering 'Well, obviously ... ' The same, but not the same.

But the whole strange episode set me thinking, and I've now decided that one can be haunted in many ways. For example, conscientious friends have recently sent me bundles of the letters I wrote them decades before.

These bundles were almost literally bolts from the blue, and I found myself strangely reluctant to look at them, or even loose the letters from their envelopes. The longer I procrastinated, the more I asked myself why I was doing so, and concluded that memory is another form of haunting: those letters are home to ghosts.

I wasn't so reluctant seven years ago. During a visit to Melbourne I watched and waited as my friend Lesley came along the street. Behind her, bearing the weight of three large boxes, toiled her son.

Lesley had started writing to me when I was first in Greece, and 30 years later the correspondence was still going strong. But she had decided to return the collection, the letters she had received from me, as it was thus far, and it turned out she had saved everything. The boxes contained a masterpiece of organisation, for every letter, postcard and photo was in its own plastic envelope, and all were in chronological order; there was even a pair of white gloves.

 

"I experienced intimations of mortality at an early age, but of course these are more pressing now, and like Prospero, my every third thought is of the grave."

 

I managed to get the content of the boxes home to Greece, where persistent work ensured that the letters I had received

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