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“Is something true if it only happens once? If it is experienced only by one person at one time? The seconds and years stretch to infinity, but a thing might be felt only at one moment. It might always be there, the world underneath and the miracle, but felt only in brief, fleeting stabs.”
These are pensive ruminations at the conclusion of Alan Lightman’s intriguing little novel Ghost. Lightman is an accomplished scientist who has written notable fiction, essays, and scientific works. In his latest work, he explores myriad social and philosophical dimensions of mortality and death, of the abiding human fascination with the paranormal, and the prospect of spiritual survival beyond the grave.
Having arrived at a bland middle age, David Kurzweil is divorced with no kids. He lives in a rooming house where he has cordial but superficial relationships with a diverse collection of fellow residents. Not a self-assured helmsman of his own life, David floats along, never quite overwhelmed but often perplexed by events. His ambit is minimalist and predictable, uncluttered by either religion or politics, or a plethora of people. He maintains a respectful but constrained filial concern for his aging mother. An avid reader, David finds his most consistent consolation in books. Possessed of acceptable looks, a diffident charm and intelligence, he has managed to win the affections of a younger pretty woman, a librarian, who brings an amorous charge to the otherwise staid and quiescent drift of his ambivalent life.
Abruptly his employment at a bank comes to an end. There is no explanation, and David does not demand one. Although he has no prior experience in the funeral business David applies for a job opening at a local mortuary and is taken on by the kindly and agoraphobic director whose family has been in the profession for three generations. The elderly director and his wife reside in a section of the building. The quiet and umbracious ambience of the funeral home is on occasion gently suffused with classical music and the redolent aroma of flowers. David takes to his new line of work and he is soon an integral part of the tiny confederation of employees who assist the director with the delicate task of caring for the dead and consoling the families and friends of those recently deceased.
But a sudden preternatural event punctures the tranquility. In the stillness of a mortuary room, David is witness to a fleeting apparition, a vaporous manifestation that appears, then vanishes only seconds later. Profoundly shocked and unsettled by what he has seen, David is beset by doubts. But he knows that he saw something, something out of the ordinary that seemed to him to have an intelligence and purpose of some kind. In confidence, he shares the few details of his odd encounter with his landlady who happens to be an enthusiast regarding things supernatural. Soon, word of David’s strange tale gets out and a tragicomic train of events ensues in which the reticent protagonist finds himself the unwitting cynosure of a raging controversy stoked by sensational news stories.
Grieving relatives — out of love or guilt or simple curiosity — seek out David in order that they might, through him, communicate with the dear departed. An organization dedicated to the investigation of parapsychic phenomena courts him and inveigles David into participating in a test of his supposed psychic abilities. Scientists from a local university who have no time for wraiths or revenants join in a mounting and increasingly vituperative debate with the advocates of the occult netherworld. All the while David is by turns bemused and flustered, embarrassed and irritated by the disconcerting hubbub he has precipitated. Perhaps he should have simply kept the experience to himself. Yet, he is increasingly certain that the ethereal something he witnessed was not simply a product of his imagination. And that something, whatever it was, is beyond rational explanation, but no less real for that.
Lightman has composed a readable and appealing yarn, a gentle satire that is also a sympathetic portrait of human fragility, yearning, and hope. Ghost touches upon those perennial questions that will ever challenge inquiring minds and captivate the human imagination. |
