'Those Who Once Lived in Them'

Like others kids I was an animist. When I left toy soldiers arranged for battle on the floor, I assumed they went on fighting while I slept, only to return to their original positions when I woke the next morning. I suspect no child is a hard-boiled positivist. That comes later. For children and a rare smattering of adults, objects and places are suffused with spirit, which helps make the world a more diverting place. 

The neighbors to our left have a garage solidly packed with unused detritus -- furniture, bundles of newspaper, paint cans, at least two lawnmowers that no longer work. The father admits he has no accurate inventory of what’s in there. I’ve entered the garage only once, when a opossum and her brood disappeared in the clutter. They may still be in there. But another neighbor who lived on this cul-de-sac his entire life until last year told me the pre-ZZ Top Billy Gibbons had a band that rehearsed in that garage back in the Sixties. It’s possible. Gibbons was born and raised in Houston. I’ve never had an interest in his music but I enjoy knowing that more than half a century ago he may have practiced John Lee Hooker licks twenty feet from where I’m sitting. It makes the junk-filled garage a more diverting place.          

 

The Spanish novelist Javier Marías died last September. I haven’t read his fiction. The only Marias volume I own is an essay collection, the Nabokovian-titled Between Eternities and Other Writings (trans. Margaret Jull Costa, 2017). I respect him for having translated, among other English-language books, Tristram Shandy, into Spanish. For years, he published essays and other work in The Threepenny Review, including “Literary Ghosts” in the Winter 2014 issue. It begins:

 

“It’s hard to know whether to blame the houses themselves or certain of their inhabitants, for some of the former seem loath to let go of those who once lived in them, perhaps—simply—because their memory lingers on: maybe someone famous lived there or perhaps it was the scene of a murder or a suicide.”

 

I’ve never encountered anything quite so melodramatic. Like Marias, “I have only the very slightest acquaintance with places where the past is not entirely hidden,” and I enjoy the imaginative sense of continuity with the past it gives me.