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A Happy Ghost

Book by Karl Kristian Flores · 15 quotes · Society, Loneliness, Life

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A Happy Ghost Quotes

“Oh, what the ocean did to a man. How unmatched it was. One could competitively build a giant castle made of sand or even hire architects to construct a true castle by the shore made of rocks and furnish its enormous insides with crystals. Yet plop him closer to the sea and within seconds, he will yield and feel as dumb as any other measly man lost at land.”

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“To Andrei, he could see all that was unpleasant about her face—her large nose and bony frame. But inside her, there was so much peace and contentment that somehow, she lit up everywhere. She was beautiful to him. It was the kind of attraction between people who were really people—and who could see the other person’s aura and makings. He saw what made her flesh move, and not her flesh. The intricate mechanics of her person, and not her shell. Andrei looked at O’Hare and saw something genderless—a kind of organism that was born and that over time has been affected and affects—that was ultimately kind and brave. It was the highest rank of physical desire one could experience. When the beautiful made standard love to each other, there always lay at least one angle of ugly—maybe in the dark, from the side, with a sound they made, or everything once one was finished. In what O’Hare and Andrei shared, beauty could take its time and no second could stop it. It was the type of wholesome love that made a couple stare for minutes at the other, not because they adored their lover’s eye color, but because in those minutes they were speaking to the person within the person, finding them, seeing them see, and playing together in that invisible planet created by two intuitive inventors.”

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“Life often functions in dull repetition, but humanity does not operate in patterns. Experiences are random to the point of them never happening again. People are different and they shift throughout space over time. Nothing may repeat. There is no one in a million. There is one in one. It was why no summer was the same. It was why some lips in history never got to test if they were good kissers. It was why Ali lost to Frazier but Frazier lost to Foreman. It is why film does not get another Marlon Brando and no music, however similar, can be compared to Debussy. To resurrect these greats is like trying to re-enter a lost dream. The shore motions toward the feet and never meets them exactly again.”

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“Our circumstance at birth is that we are placed on a planet with no prior choice and appointed sensation and awareness—and then nothing after it. There won’t be an opportunity to look back or to be ashamed. What to do? Walk the rock and see more of the earth? Fill our playtime with the current inventions? No, I want to go toward other people. Other moving humans. No technology or machine in the world could match the pricelessness of life. It’s a universally precious. It can’t be saved and so has the most value.”

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“Plenty of evil happened inside that building. One may encourage Andrei to cheer up, that it was only the building: “Don’t sweat it, man. It isn’t real. That’s only one part of the world,” assured Andrei’s co-workers on his first week. But it was real. I mean, it was upstairs for Christ’s sake. “And one part of the world,” Andrei said to himself, “is still of the world.” It was too easy to try and remedy depression by widening one’s perspective and proclaiming there were a million other avenues in which to see life. It did not change the fact that such hotels existed. Hotels with affairs. Abuse. Drugs that scared. All of this told him that people did not sit on grass fields, melting under the sun, sacrificing their afternoons with friends to love. Instead, they purchased king suites with escorts and ordered wagyu rare.”

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“Every artist loved their art for the same reason, and this caused no suspicion to the world. They regularly say: 'My field captures the human experience.' 'And what is the human experience to you exactly?' questions O’Hare. 'I want to be a storyteller who inspires and expresses their imagination.' 'But how does your chosen art differ from other mediums?' questions O’Hare. 'I am a quiet observer who innately loves philosophy.' But here you are screaming this in a room, cries Dr. O’Hare. 'I am beyond grateful for the people I’ve worked with who made this the greatest collaboration I could have ever asked for.' 'But how did you collaborate—with thought and rehearsal?—or did you just perform some damn thing and sign both your names on it?' asked O’Hare.”

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“Whenever he contemplated death, he felt he would miss thinking most of all. There was a delicate pleasure of thought and sensation. The awareness of it. The inner voice of thoughtless reasoning, effortless analyzing, ceaseless tingling. It was the only thing a person had if everything were taken away from them. It was what continued to exist before they touched any object or heard any sound once awaken from slumber. That personal conversation was irreplaceable. Andrei would be upset at death, whenever it came, because of what it entailed: no longer being able to look down and see one’s hands. No longer being able to feel a breathing belly. No longer able to wonder, or to remember a memory. It surprised him, in such a stupid, sad way, that there was no save button in life. Yes, yes, we die, I get it, he thought, but for some reason, he’d pathetically assumed he could take something with him. That death would be okay because at least he would still be able to reflect. In theory, he would die and get to say, “Whew, I died. Now let’s think about it.” But he wouldn’t. All the memories he had earned would wash away instantly. The work done on oneself could not be transferred. He would not trim his fingernails or have the chance to check out another woman’s ass ever again. Death was flat. Aliveness had texture.”

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“This living organism breathed, could roam around the world, see and be seen, and make any mess it wanted. And here Andrei was, pulsing in a field with another pulse. How miraculous that for a short period, the two of them could focus their eyes, turn their heads, lift their limbs, and run straight into the arms of another person. The living were not rocks or wood, incapable of being affected by chance, but rather forces of momentary magic that could digress and collide with anything it chose. Should a human ever feel bored lying atop their bed, they could change reality and within thirty seconds walk outside and strike up a new conversation with another pulse on the street. The living sound an ancient, sacred, temporary hum that is exclusive to them. Once gone, it can never be retrieved. But if there still, it could do anything.”

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“He looked at these prayer candles quite indifferently, and feeling an impulse to shape his lips into an ‘O’ and release some air, Andrei blew the entire table out. Once he’d finished, large clouds of slow smoke spiraled into the dark air, for a moment appearing like fossils, and then rose into oblivion. But oblivion was not beautiful. It met him with dread. Andrei could hear the whispers of desperate folks who lighted their single candle to pray for relief. He heard screams for help, answers begged for, and pleas for private miracles. He’d slaughtered every single prayer. “Where do their lights all go—now that I’ve done that?” asked the panicked boy.”

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“Andrei perched on the rooftop of the cinema and looked out at Westwood’s nightlife bustling before him. He was mounted on the single, cream, stoned gargoyle built above in the corner of the theatre. He and his gothic animal breathed under the cold moon. Yes. He always felt like the moon—generally unnoticed by the world, that never minds—and navigated richly through his life alone and uninterrupted, like a ghost. Truth is an unobvious color. Those who attempt truth will never make billboards or conversations but usually sift in the background in awkward veritas.”

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“I’ve gotten it wrong," he said. He always tried to grasp life by zooming out. That was his generation. They were fast with science and believed in the cosmos, and conceptualized reality in academic comfort which made them superior to it. They argued life had no meaning and said things like, “We’re just smart animals on an uncaring rock.” But at some point, a person trying to organize their life with reason would be stuck in infinity. There was nothing to reason with. And so they had to return— return to the monotony that meant something a second time. “My mom,” he dreamed, “once cried to me when she saw a bird chirping on her fence... real, bucket tears. She used to tell me her dreams which always meant something... A grown woman who used to pick up sticks she found pretty and keep them in her bag...She was always sweating...” There was a dumbness to her he could never understand. Andrei’s mother, so pathetically an earthling, lived in touch with humanity, and was involved in it so deeply that no intelligent, zoomed- out mind could ever comprehend. “I don’t want concepts. There is nowhere else to go in life except toward each other.”

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