An Honest Ghost Read Online Free PDF

Samsa, his little legs trembling, climbs the armchair and looks out of his room, no longer remembering (so Kafka’s narrative goes) the sense of liberation that gazing out of the window had formerly given him.
    The price he exacted for submitting himself to so much culture was the frequent excursions that we made together into the world of popular entertainment. It seemed to amuse him, so I complied with his odd request. I am a white American male who listened to nothing but classical music until the age of twenty. I felt myself sliding deliciously downwards into a miasma of kindliness. That is how everything works, pluses and minuses. Silence, he said, was of all things the most oppressive to his nerves.
    We take long walks among the flying leaves and ponder turnings taken by our lives. Sunshine, a bird with a special, rather literary song, country noises (a motor), solitude, peace, no aggression. Forced to make do, we do rather well.
    You never stop learning, that’s what’s great about life. Apart from that, I really can’t think of anything. To all appearances it looks like calm, like I’m unflappable. Or maybe not.
    It was that dim grey hour when things are just creeping out of darkness, when everything is colourless and clear cut, and yet unreal. The other houses on the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces. Joe said, “I’m confident I can teach myself everything I want to know by reading books and seeking out the knowledge that interests me.” Then he was silent for a long time, shuddering and sighing like an animal. He wanted to be a veterinarian. He believed that animals, too, have souls and that man is an intermediate link in the chain of beings connecting the world of animals and the world of pure spirits. “All you’ve got to do is simply learn to resist yourself. In other words, there are all sorts of things that happen that make us…that let us make one choice rather than another, hmm? You have to tell a story! I will not be silent anymore. Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. Our twentieth century has been almost one long holocaust of world wars and local genocidal conflicts, with the largest losses of life being caused by huge bureaucratic governments systematically exterminating their own subjects. The aim of life, Freud says, is death, is the return of the organic to the inorganic, supposedly our earlier state of being. One last point. The future has not yet produced anything to be happy about. Everyone today will agree that the world we have fabricated during the last two hundred years is hideous compared with any fabricated in earlier times.”
    What a strange mind! He dismissed bourgeois society as a mechanism lacking the poetic element, an agglomeration of individuals motivated by self-interest and not held together by any moral bonds. Among the strongest impulses of his imagination was an urge to find parallels and connections between events that occur on a local, human scale and events that occur on the vastly larger scale of history, evolution, and cosmology.
    Everywhere, between the houses, those old and dingy houses, whose windows would catch the sunrise with untold splendor, showed plots of garden, like snatches of old song. “The main thing,” Joe says, “oh yeah, the mainest thing … is, when you fall, fall in the direction of your work.”
    I was stirred by these ideas. Fortunately, I am not a hysterical person. “Well, yeah,” I philosophized. “You know what you should be doing, you know what is right, but that is not what you do.” If you care to put it that way, you can say it is a simple story.
    “I don’t,” said Joe. “Who is your favorite writer?”
    “Karl Ove Knausgaard,” I said.
    Towards dark he went out.
    I had been rescued from my solitude; I had been given another chance; and I had high hopes of a future that would cancel out the past. I of all people. Loveless,