The world ends when the spirits of the unforgotten dead grow so huge in number that there’s no room left for the living.

Nobody knows why.

The list of ghosts includes:

• The ghosts of everyone who ever lived, anywhere, at any time in the history of humanity, whether for a hundred years or just a few minutes – plus the ghosts of their children and parents and grandparents and everyone they ever knew or heard about or fell in love with or never even met
• The ghosts of pets and other domestic or wild animals – including fleas and sheep and killer whales, and ants and elephants and single-celled organisms in their billions and trillions
• The ghosts of objects, such as rocks and chairs and cursed toys, of which a subset is the spirits of place: sacred mountains, malevolent old houses, lonely stretches of water etc. as well as a range of meteorological and atmospheric conditions including winds, and sunsets, and haunted rain
• The ghosts of smells and sensations, half-forgotten perfumes and paint colours, snatches of scratchy songs from old tapes or vinyl records, piano chords coming from distant rooms you could never find your way back to, behind doors you closed a lifetime ago and so on
• The ghosts of the people that people once were, or could have been if things had turned out differently, or could never have been, no matter how hard they tried
• The ghosts of missed chances, missed opportunities, missed everythings

It turns out that the animists were right. Everything has a soul. And, consequently, an eternal afterlife. And, consequently, the need for somewhere to live it.

Continue reading “How the World Ends #53: Ghosts” →