I’ve been writing a book about a failed and forgotten science, poring over the testimony of people who saw and heard impossible things, for years now. I joke that it will make me crazy. People ask if I believe in ghosts, and I can always tell if they’re asking because they experience reality as haunted in some way, or because they think I’ve fixed on a wrong idea. Walking out of the icy American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) library into the sunset-saturated clamor of evening on the Upper West Side, I feel like a shade among the living. I have my feet in other people’s inner worlds, their yearnings and anxieties are mine. Traffic, bodegas, the cartoon animals on children’s backpacks wash over me, meaning obscured by a curtain of sheer sensory noise. Unmoored, I take my cell phone out of my pocket and call whoever will answer. It’s as simple as trading gossip with my high school best friend or an old roommate. Unbeknownst to them, they’re talking me back into our common reality. But where am I when I’m drifting? What if no one answers the call? Over time, the people we love slip out of range.
It was hard for his friends to let William James go. “I always thought that [he] would continue forever”, declared the irascible editor John Jay Chapman, “and I relied upon his sanctity as if it were sunlight.”1 James’ death in August of 1910 came on quickly, though he had long suffered from ill health. The fact that he was so often sick, and the causes of his illness so obscure, made even James doubt that his heart would finally fail. Perhaps he could still think his way out of it. If only he could overcome the growing anxiety that his major contributions to philosophy, 1907’s Pragmatism and 1909’s A Pluralistic Universe, were being misinterpreted and poorly received. His gasping for breath was “partly a spasmodic phenomenon”, he insisted, something in the mind. Yet, as his brother and wife rushed him across the Atlantic after another failed Alpine rest cure, it became clear to all of them that it would be his last return to New England. In constant pain, he could no longer walk and had to be carried on a litter. Sixty-eight years of chaotic comings and goings, restless transmissions, had come to an end. This ending left Henry James “in darkness . . . abandoned and afraid”.2 The elder brother was a pillar shoring up Henry’s unstable emotions. “His death changes and blights everything for me”, Henry wrote, staggering under the weight and finality of loss.