Reading/Recreating

I finished reading Frye's Secular Scripture today. Although I lack most of the literary knowledge required to fully appreciate his arguments, I did pull some bits from each chapter that provoke some thoughts. The final chapter in particular has some good quotes:

"The past is not returned to; it is recreated..."
"...imagination brings to life the specters of the dead who inhabit memory, creation thus being to memory what resurrection is to death."
"One's reading thus becomes an essential part of a process of self-creation and self-identity that passes beyond all the attached identifications, with society or belief or nature, that we have been tracing."

We touched on these ideas a few gatherings ago. When one remembers, it's not like pulling a file from a cabinet. Instead, its more like painting a familiar picture on a blank canvas. Every act of remembering is an act of recreation which changes the memory. By remembering, we are constantly updating and revising our view of the past and, therefore, of the present.

What is interesting to me is this idea of "specters of the dead". I've had a similar thought before. I was confronting my own mortality, trying to come to terms with the fact that this life will come to an end. It frightened me, and still does to some extent. Death itself is not what worries me because it is that which takes away all worries. No, what I struggle with is the question of whether anything I do will really matter, if any of my labors will mean anything.

As I chewed on this thought, I came to a realization: the dead speak through us. Not in a black magic, seance, talking in tongues way, but in a very real way based on our interconnectedness. This is because everything about us, from the way to we dress to the foods we like to the words we use, has been informed by all who have come before us. As long as one touches another, who touches another, etc., the continuity is never broken. There is a thread running through all of humanity: woven by the dead, carried by the living, and passed on to the unborn.