TEMPUS EDAX RERUM

“Ghosts are a problem for historicism precisely because they disrupt our sense of linear teleology in which the consecutive movement of history passes untroubled through the generations” (14). They continue by pointing out that ghosts signal “the appearance of something in a time in which they clearly do not belong” (14). Humans like to think of time moving in a straight, ordered line with a clear distinction between past, present, and future…the ghost disrupts this desire for a well-ordered sense of time because it refuses to go away and stay in its proper time and place. In this way, ghosts respond to our own existential anxieties about time and death, our inability to control or fully understand either, and our nagging sense that categories like past, present, and future are not easily distinguishable from one another.