Halloween

Dear Ghosts,

I’m fond of quoting Thomas Hobbes: ‘Imagination and Memory are but one thing.’  We might add ghosts to that list. They’re a kind of memory, too, a collective memory, or if you do meet one, a hallucination, which, at least in the early days of psychiatry, was considered a ‘disease of the imagination’—that is, a malignant imagination. In any case, stop trying to haunt me. I don’t believe in you. You’re just embarrassing yourself.

Cheers,

—BD

31 Oct. 2025