Talking to the dead

The turning point of my life and the impetus for this publication

Have you ever conversed with a dead person?

I have.

Well, he never heard a word from me, but I swear that I heard his words as if they were spoken in my very ear.

But there was something very special about the conditions of that moment that allowed me to hear. No, I didn’t perform a voodoo ritual or use a Ouija board. I was merely at a point in my life when I was actually willing and able to listen to something hard that I needed to hear, but didn’t want to. If it had happened any earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to listen.

Growing up, I never read much for pleasure. I was way more hooked on video games. Entertainment and comfort was the only thing I really wanted from life. I did my reading assignments in school, and otherwise worked decently hard on my homework, but that was only so I could get a good job, so I could make a lot of money and live easily.

But things just didn’t work out that way.

I was fortunate that my early career was very successful (at least in my mind). It was honestly a blessing and a curse, because I both had the chance to realize my dreams early on but also realize that those dreams were completely empty.

I had basically just been climbing the neverending ladder of financial success, and somehow I got a chance to jump a few rungs up pretty early on, and then I got a chance to peak over the ledge which the ladder was upon, and I saw what there was at the top.

A wasteland.

I realized in an isntant that it had all been a myth. A falsehood. Everything I was working for was completely meaningless. There was no real destination at the top. The cake was a lie.

So what is one to do? I’ll paraphrase Steven Covey here: When you realize the ladder is on the wrong wall, it doesn’t make any sense to keep climbing. The only thing you can do is get off the ladder, and then you can try to find the right wall to put it on.

So what happens when you get off the ladder? When everything you thought you were working towards was completely meaningless? Well you are in a place that is literally “rock bottom.” You can’t go any lower.

Suffice it that during this period I was completely disillusioned. I had no idea what to do. And then I came across the words of a dead person that would completely change my life.

The specific quotes are too numerous and lengthy to include here, but there is one that adequately represents the style of revelations I discovered, and also summarizes the impact they all had on me.

There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

This book was that book for me. When I read the words of Thoreau, I felt as if he was speaking directly to me. It was an odd feeling to say the least. This man, who had lived and died nearly 150 years ago, had put pen to paper and inscribed words which seemed destined for me alone.

Indeed, the book did utter the unutterable things I had been feeling during my journeys up and down the ladder of success. It did explain my miracles, and revealed new ones. Namely this-

That books could contain the answers to some of the deepest questions of life. That I was not alone in the world. That I could find some solace and guidance in the experiences of others. And also this-

That I wanted to continue this process. And I mean this in two senses. First, that I wanted to continue reading. Not just any books, but these books, the great books, which contain the most difficult and raw struggles of humanity, and the stupefying truths they found there.

A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered…

Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him—my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them.

I had found a greater store of wealth than I could have ever hoped to find through the career/financial ladder. Golden words.

But more than that, I wanted to continue the process in the second sense. I wanted to write words like that. Words that would strike deep into the heart of my readers, and make them feel that I was speaking directly to them, though we might be separated by thousands of miles, or hundreds of years. I wanted to utter the unutterable things.

That what I hope The Apocalypse to be.