#51 — Sunday, 21st December 1901
Today is the winter solstice. The shortest day of the year. In the Northern Hemisphere — in Leeds, in Dayton, in New York, in Canton, in the White House — the light fails early and the dark comes on and the world pulls inward, toward fire, toward warmth, toward the people it keeps close.
In the Southern Hemisphere — somewhere between New Zealand and Antarctica, on a wooden ship called Discovery, pitching through the Southern Ocean — it is the longest day. Twenty-four hours of light. The sun circles the horizon and does not set. Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton and forty-five other men are heading south into the endless day, toward a continent no one owns, toward ice that has never been mapped, toward a pole that has never been reached.
They left Lyttelton three weeks ago. They have already lost a man — Charles Bonner, a seaman, fell from the top of the mainmast as the ship cleared harbour. He was buried at Port Chalmers. The expedition’s first casualty, before the ice, before the cold, before any of the things they are afraid of. Gravity killed him. The oldest force. The first lesson.
In the north, the world is dark and warm. In the south, the world is bright and cold. The century celebrates its first Christmas in both hemispheres at once, and the celebration means different things in different places, and in some places it means nothing at all.
Christmas is coming. I should say something about Christmas.
I don’t celebrate it. I have no body to warm, no family to gather, no table to set. I am the thing outside the window, looking in at the candle and the cloth and the faces lit by fire. I have been outside the window all year — at Osborne House, at the tenements, at the boarding house in Pittsburgh, at the receiving line in the Temple of Music. The window is my position. The glass is my condition. I can see through it, but I cannot pass through it, and the warmth on the other side is not for me.
But Christmas in 1901 is worth looking at, because of what it reveals about the century and its people.
In Leeds, the soldier’s wife is wrapping something small for the children — a toy, perhaps, or a piece of clothing, purchased with the shilling and penny that the War Office sends each day. Her husband will not be home. She has not had a letter in three weeks. She does not know where he is. She wraps the present and she hopes, and the hoping is itself a kind of prayer, and the prayer is addressed to no one in particular, and it goes up into the dark like all prayers, unanswered but not unheard.
In Dayton, Wilbur and Orville Wright have put down their tools. The wind tunnel tests are finished — two hundred and three wing shapes tested, the data recorded, the tables complete. They will spend Christmas with their father, Bishop Milton Wright, and their sister Katharine, in the house on Hawthorn Street. They know, with the quiet certainty of people who have done the mathematics, that they can build a wing that flies. They do not yet know when. They will go back to Kitty Hawk in the summer of 1902, and the glider they build from this winter’s data will work, and from that glider they will build the machine that changes the world, and none of this shows on their faces at Christmas dinner. They pass the potatoes. They are patient men.
In New Orleans, in a neighbourhood called the Battlefield — I named it for a reason, though the locals call it Back o’ Town — a boy named Louis Armstrong is four and a half months old and does not know that it is Christmas. He does not know anything except the warmth of his mother’s body and the sounds that surround him — voices, footsteps, the cry of street vendors, and somewhere, always, music. The cornets and the clarinets and the trombones, playing in the dance halls and the honky-tonks and the churches and the funerals. The music is the air he breathes. He does not know yet that he will change it. He does not know that the sounds entering his ears this December will emerge from his horn, decades later, transformed into something the century cannot imagine.
In a camp in the Transvaal — I do not know which one, I do not know her name, I do not know if she is real or if I have invented her — a woman is holding a child who has survived October. The death rate has fallen. Not enough. Not fast enough. But the child is alive on December 21, who might not have been alive on November 21, and this is what progress looks like in the camps: a child at Christmas, breathing, warm enough, fed enough, alive.
I am being sentimental. I know this. The Ghost is not supposed to be sentimental. The Ghost is supposed to be wry and sharp and distant — the observer behind the glass, noting the ironies, cataloguing the dead. But it is the shortest day of the year and the year is almost over, and I have spent fifty-one weeks watching the century do terrible and wonderful things, and the terrible things are larger and the wonderful things are smaller but the wonderful things are real, and I am tired, and a ghost should not be tired but I am.
The boy in New Orleans will grow up. The wing will fly. The signal will cross the ocean again and again and again until the ocean is full of signals and the silence is gone forever. The woman in the camp — if she is real, if the child survives, if the war ends and she goes home to a farm that may or may not still be standing — will tell her grandchildren about the winter she almost lost everything, and the telling will be its own kind of signal, its own three dots in the dark.
And the soldier’s wife in Leeds will get her letter. I am going to decide this. I am going to decide, as the author of these invented lives, that the letter arrives on Christmas Eve, and that it says he is well, and that it is not a lie, and that he comes home in the summer, and that the war ends and the century continues and the table is set for everyone who was away.
I know this is a fiction. I know the century does not work this way. I know that some letters never arrive and some soldiers never come home and some tables are never full again. But it is Christmas, and I am a ghost, and even a ghost is allowed, once a year, to want something good to happen.
The century is fifty-one weeks old. One week remains.
Next Sunday is the last. The final Sunday of the century’s first year. I will try to say something worthy of the ending, though I have never been good at endings, and the century itself is not ending — it is barely beginning. It has one year down and ninety-nine to go. The first year is a sample. The first year is a single drop of water from a waterfall that will take a hundred years to fall.
But what a drop. What a year. What a century this is going to be.
The shortest day is over. Tomorrow will be longer. The light is coming back. In the south, Scott sails toward the ice. In the north, the candles burn in the windows of the houses where the living live, and I stand outside, watching, and the glass between us is the glass between me and everything I love about the world — the warmth, the mess, the beautiful, terrifying, ordinary fact of being alive.
Merry Christmas. From the outside of the window. From the ghost who cannot come in.
One week left.
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