Yes, everything becomes attenuated, but it’s also true to say that nothing entirely disappears, there remain faint echoes and elusive memories that can surface at any moment like the fragments of gravestones in the room in a museum that no one visits, as cadaverous as ruined tympana with their fractured inscriptions, past matter, dumb matter, almost indecipherable, nearly meaningless, absurd remnants preserved for no reason, because they can never be put together again, and they give out less light than darkness, are not so much memory as forgetting. And yet there they are, and no one destroys them or pieces together their sundry fragments scattered or lost centuries ago: they are kept there like small treasures or out of superstition, as valuable witnesses to the fact that someone once existed and died and had a name, even though we cannot see the whole person and reconstructing him is impossible, even though no one cares at all about that someone who is now no one.
Yes, the dead are quite wrong to come back, and yet almost all of them do, they won’t give up, and they strive to become a burden to the living until the living shake them off in order to move on. We never eliminate all vestiges, though, we never manage, truly, once and for all, to silence that past matter, and sometimes we hear an almost imperceptible breathing.
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