Ghosts in the material world
John Gray revives the memory of a ghost story to discuss materialism - the theory that only matter exists.
According to a curious, subtle, now largely forgotten writer: "Any event in this world - any human being for that matter - that seems to wear even the faintest cast or warp of strangeness, is apt to leave a disproportionately sharp impression on one's senses."
In contrast, he goes on, "Life's mere ordinary day-to-day - its thoughts, talk, doings - wither and die out of the mind like leaves from a tree. Year after year a similar crop recurs, and that goes too. It is mere debris, it perishes. But these other anomalies survive, even through the cold of age."
These lines come at the beginning of a story by Walter de la Mare, published in 1924, which deals with one of these anomalous experiences. During the later decades of his long life - he was born in 1873 and died in 1956 - de la Mare was a familiar feature of the English literary landscape, a poet and anthologist whose poems were learnt by heart by successive generations of schoolchildren and whose books were widely available in public libraries.
So why is he so little known today? It may be because his work conveys a sense of the insubstantial quality of everyday things, a point of view that runs counter to the prevailing creed of scientific materialism.
At his peak of public recognition, de Le Mare was most celebrated as a writer for children, but in nearly everything he wrote he explored experiences of the uncanny. The story from which I've quoted - which is definitely meant for grown-ups - communicates this in an especially intense and concentrated way.
(continued) I iz materialist.
