The Haunted House of Childhood (II)

But as anyone who’s watched The Exorcist knows, it isn’t as easy as sprinkling a bit of holy water. You have to work at it. And you have to tackle the spectres time and again, from different directions, and in many different ways.
I’m loathe to claim, here and now, that I have laid these ghosts to rest. Instead, as Tennyson once put it, I seem ‘to move among a world of ghosts, /And feel myself the shadow of a dream.’ Perhaps knowing and accepting one’s ghosts is the best that we can hope for.