Ghosts Book

Everything in this world resembles something else so Ghosts vaguely echoes The Tempest by William Shakespeare. And the island is something between Aeaea - Circe's home isle, and the Land of Nod - the place of Cain's exile.
Extraordinary the look of things at dusk then, it might have been another planet, with that pale vault of sky, those crouched and hesitant, dreamy distances. I wandered about the house, going softly through the stillness and shadows, and sometimes I would lose myself, I mean I would flow out of myself somehow and be as a phantom, a patch of moving dark against the lighter darkness all around me.
Those shipwrecked are personages descended from Harlequin and Columbine - the painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau: the disagreeable characters with their disagreeable past, except the children, of course, - the children are bound for their disagreeable future. Professor Silas Kreutznaer is a kind of Prospero and Freddie Montgomery is a sort of Caliban.
This lovely world, and we the only blot on the landscape. We, or just me? Sometimes I think I can feel the world recoiling from me, as if from the touch of some uncanny, cold and sticky thing.
The ghosts of his past are still tormenting Freddie and he still keeps wondering how he could fall so low and turn into such a beast: "What statue of myself did I erect long ago, I wonder? Must have been a gargoyle."
Diderot developed a theory of ethics based on the idea of the statue: if we would be good, he said, we must become sculptors of the self. Virtue is not natural to us; we achieve it, if at all, through a kind of artistic striving, cutting and shaping the material of which we are made, the intransigent stone of selfhood, and erecting an idealised effigy of ourselves in our own minds and in the minds of those around us and living as best we can according to its sublime example.
When we all learn to sculpt our own virtues then, at last, we'll become true human beings…