Wandering Spooks 
David Simpson
Conjuring up the ghost of his dead friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh asks what things are like in the afterlife. Enkidu tells him it might be better that these truths remain hidden, but he agrees to answer the hero’s questions about the individual fates of those he knew on earth. It seems that life after death is not so different after all, a somewhat intensified but not inexplicable or inappropriate continuation of worldly behaviour. Ghostly as he is, Enkidu can still be embraced. Achilles is not quite so lucky: after a long conversation with the spirit or phantom of Patroclus in Iliad 23, he reaches out but grasps only air, as the image of his dead friend turns to vapour and disappears beneath the earth, losing language as well as form.
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David Simpson teaches English at the University of California, Davis. His most recent book is 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern will come out from Cambridge next year.
Other articles by this contributor:
Touches of the Real · Stephen Greenblatt
The Mourning Paper · war and showing pictures of the dead
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