"When I first caught sight of the girl, i didn't believe she was real. I thought it was a mirage, or maybe some kind of Brocken spectre, one of those tricks of the light or the gloaming that hill walkers tell you about. I mean, what else could I think ? One moment, I was alone and then, suddenly, she was there, walking beside me, step for step, through the wet peat. She had her head down - she didn't look at me, not once - but she knew I was there. She knew I was there from the first - and that was why her head was down, because I was there. She didn't want to look at me, she was desperately trying to pretend I wasn't there - and it came to me, why I cannot begin to think, but it came to me that she was frightened. I frightened her. And, God knows, she frightened me too - but what frightened me most, at that moment, was her fear. Because, at that moment, as we walked in step through the driving rain, I felt like a monster, or an apparition. "
- John Burnside/ The Deer Larder
See that? From witnessing an apparition to becoming one, in one paragraph. No-one is real, we are all ghosts.
"Let your dream in this terrestrial life be, that you are standing in a temple, and God is all that you see, all you desire. "
- Arthur van Schendel/ Of Courtly Love and Beauty
