All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir

by Seán Hewitt

And it was in this way that the ghosts of the city were parcelled off, ushered from the streets into derelict buildings, made to stand in exhibition cases, hurried into the pages of books and diaries, and folded away. For, after all, ghosts can only live in the darkness; and once the dark places are closed up, their cast-iron locks bolted fast, it is easy for those who do not live with them to pretend that ghosts do not exist at all.

knew, from the earliest age I can remember, that one day I would have to tell my parents and my friends a secret about myself, a secret I could not escape, and they would leave me, or I would have to leave them, and then my happiness would be over. And so I savoured the happiness, cradled it, saw my childhood (even as I was living it) through a lens of nostalgia. Soon, I knew, it would be over. Soon I would have to end it. There was happiness, yes, but there was always the relentless knowledge of time running out. Love, comfort, safety, all of them ran like sand through an hourglass.

It’s not only matter that is folded and mimicked into new forms – time is folded into them, too. Everything carries within itself the remnant forms of older selves, older structures we have evolved through, vestiges of the history of our species. Every day, the present and the past coexist in the body. I think we carry those other histories, too, even before we know them. We speak with those ghosts all the time, even before we recognise who they are or what they are telling us.