Ghosts Are My Teachers

— pil·grim·age
\pil-gr?-mij\ • noun • 14th century
1: a journey of a pilgrim; especially : one to a shrine or a sacred place. 2: the course of life on earth —

Some years ago, in the Special Collections of the Free Public Library in Concord, Massachusetts, I sat for several hours with a thin green notebook, poring over the distinctive scrawl in its pages. A forty-five-year-old writer had worked on this manuscript in his last days, considerably weakened with tuberculosis. At several points in the notebook the scrawl broke off, replaced by a neater feminine script. The manuscript was the first draft of the famous essay, “Walking,” one of Henry David Thoreau’s crowning creations. Thoreau’s sister and deathbed nurse, Sophia, took dictation when he was too weak to write.

My feelings upon holding that notebook are probably indescribable. Eighteen years old, I had crossed the country to Concord, alone on the longest journey of my life. I wanted to walk through the historical world of Thoreau and Emerson, the writers who meant most to me then. I wanted to pay my respects at their gravestones. I wanted to see Walden Pond. But I’d never expected to enjoy the transcendent, time-defying privilege of turning through Thoreau’s last handwritten pages. Nobody had told me such things were possible!

As I held them, I imagined the pages changing hands. First Thoreau had propped them in his lap as he sat up in his sickbed immersed in his poetic outpouring. Later, seeing that he’d fallen asleep, Sophia gently drew them from beneath his hands. Henry stirred and said he would like to keep working and asked her to take down his words. The pages in her lap now, Sophia sat beside the bed transcribing. Eventually the pages were delivered to Henry’s publisher Ticknor & Fields. Years later Mr. Fields donated them, bound in the green notebook, to Concord’s Public Library. And a century after that a young literary pilgrim on the longest journey of his life sat in the library basement reading the pages for hours, alone in the ghostly presence of his literary hero.

This profound experience taught me conclusively that the artistic and historical past lives on beyond textbooks or centennial editions of great works. The past abides in centuries-old rough drafts, or in the rooms where these were written, or in the village or city where the rooms were located, or in the very landscape where the village or city stood. The past is not the room or village or landscape itself, but can be found there. It can be held in hand. It can be felt underfoot.

Why look for the past this way? Because as the playwright John Guare observes, inspiration does not arrive merely because one waits around for it. Rather, inspiration is an assertive act:

If you love something it is a categorical imperative commanding you to absorb what it is you love and make it yours.

By an act of inspirational pilgrimage we make the past ours – and once the past is ours, the present turns powerfully prescient. Whatever our hopes may be, we find them enlivened with new possibility, given vital precedents to support them and speed them on. This, precisely, is what I learned in the Concord Free Public Library that day. The past can come alive within us, more significant than textbook pages, more useful than legend, more personal than hagiography.

So, since that first long journey to Concord, my life has been punctuated by pilgrimages. Being a naturally solitary person (and a non-academic), I have, over the last twelve years or so, searched among literary ghosts for kindred spirits, for guiding voices, and a godspeed from the enduring past. This has been a remarkable — and remarkably vivid — education. The ghosts themselves have been my teachers.

My pilgrimages have affirmed beyond doubt what Thoreau’s friend and mentor Emerson proclaimed in a poem.

The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told
In groves of oak or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.

Human beings are mutable and mortal, of course. But the human spirit never vanishes without a trace. Humans, living in a place or passing through it, will always be in that place for having been there once. Pilgrimage can reawaken one to this important mystery (it’s no coincidence that the word is often used to describe human existence).

As the ruminative narrator of Thornton Wilder’s ageless play, Our Town, observes while standing in the hilltop cemetery above Grover’s Corners:

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses, and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars. Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it.

Pilgrimage can connect us to one another across a gulf of generations. Wherever the span of time threatens to make a person remote or an event impersonal, pilgrimage can restore immediacy and facilitate intimacy. Pilgrimage reminds that every past had its present (just as our present will eventually be a past).

And for the artist or aspirant, pilgrimage reveals that every enduring work was once unborn and unknown to the world — each required the vision, commitment, and often seemingly senseless dedication of a living person. Is that particular person now a so-called “immortal”? It wasn’t always so. Once, however long ago, in a room in a village or city, a solitary soul filled pages with words, covered a canvas with paint, or dotted a scoresheet with musical notes (and did so, perhaps, despite looming anxiety about paying the bills, staying healthy, or striving not to disappoint friends and relations).

My pilgrimages have taken me across the globe (and not because I have money to burn; I don’t).

In the Wye Valley of Wales, high on the hill overlooking Tintern Abbey, I declaimed Wordsworth’s famous poem and understood anew his rendering of the surrounding countryside:

…hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!

In Prague, I wandered the labyrinthine, paranoia-inducing streets of Rainer Maria Rilke’s fearful boyhood (and of Kafka’s).

In Glen Ellen, California I stood in Jack London’s living room and read multiple rejection letters of The Call of the Wild. (“The reading public doesn’t care to read stories about the Yukon, thank you all the same.”)

More recently, I took a somewhat less literary pilgrimage to a tiny township (population 700) in the heart of the Midwest. Nobody particularly famous ever came out of this place, though local lore has it that Jesse James passed through at least once. One drizzly morning I visited the old cemetery on the edge of town and found the weathered headstone of an ancestor from five generations past.

At age eighteen or nineteen this great-great-great grandfather was severely wounded in the Civil War. He suffered the privations of a deplorable Confederate prison and lived to tell of it.

While I’d read his regiment’s various histories, that young Union soldier had remained an essentially fictional character to me. But now I knelt before his simple grave-marker and ran my fingers over the etched letters of his name, regiment, and company number — and was flooded with unexpected emotion. I whipped the cap from my head, letting the rain wet my hair as I paid proper respects.

In that powerful moment, as in many another transformative moment of pilgrimage, I heard a voice like the one in Walt Whitman’s majestic poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry“:

What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or the hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not — distance avails not, and place avails not …

… Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?

Every past was once the present. Its voices are real, as mine is real. The process goes on, and I am part of it. We all are.

Feeling uninspired, inconsequential, disconnected? Seek inspiration, consequence, and connection. Consider a pilgrimage.

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

You might also enjoy:

“The Value of Travel: One Household’s Mild Manifesto”

“Soaring Success, Devastating Failure: A Samurai’s Story”

“The Ground Underfoot: Why Stories Matter”

“Looking Deeply, Proceeding On (Lewis & Clark)“