When great people you have known are dead, their influence on you takes a different form. Parents and extended family and even their friends – if you’ve been lucky enough to have had them in these troubled days – assume an almost mythological status. We didn’t need Freud or Jung to spell this out. Most of us already knew it in our bones. Much of later life, then, becomes a series of starts and stops in conversation with persons dead and forgotten, then remembered, again and again, as we make our way through our own dusty days.
T.S. Eliot got it just right in “Little Gidding”:
what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
