From Nixon to hungry ghosts

May 25-28, 1975 I read:

Nixon's Psychiatric Profile, Eli S. Cheson, M.D.
This was an interesting book. History buffs and Watergate buffs might still find it interesting.

May 25-28, 2005 I read:

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, by Lafcadio Hearn
These are short ghost stories from ancient Japan, translated in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Hearn died in 1904).

The Nixon book above was much scarier than Hearn's book. The stories in Kwaidan, even when describing stark terror, factor in some cause and effect along with the wistful beauty and eerieness. Hearn can also be charming and funny, as when he talks about the mosquitoes that torment him in Tokyo, which are said to be the souls of hungry ghosts.

With a view to self-protection I have been reading Dr. Howard's book, "Mosquitoes." I am persecuted by mosquitoes. There are several species in my neighborhood; but only one of them is a serious torment,-- a tiny needly thing, all silver-speckled and silver-streaked. The puncture of it is sharp as an electric burn; and the mere hum of it has a lancinating quality of tone which foretells the quality of the pain about to come,-- much in the same way that a particular smell suggests a particular taste. … And I have discovered that it comes from the Buddhist cemetery,-- a very old cemetery,-- in the rear of my garden.

The remedy suggested is pouring kerosene on the surface of stagnant water where the mosquitoes breed -- but every grave in the cemetery had cups to offer water and flowers to the dead. He ponders this--

To free the city from mosquitoes it would be necessary to demolish the ancient graveyards;-- and that would signify the ruin of the Buddhist temples attached to them;-- and that would mean the disparition of so many charming gardens, with their lotus-ponds and Sanscrit-lettered monuments and humpy bridges and holy groves and weirdly-smiling Buddhas! So the extermination of the Culex fasciatus would involve the destruction of the poetry of the ancestral cult-- surely too great a price to pay!...

Besides, I should like, when my time comes, to be laid away in some Buddhist graveyard of the ancient kind. . . . That old cemetery behind my garden would be a suitable place. Everything there is beautiful with a beauty of exceeding and startling queerness; each tree and stone has been shaped by some old, old ideal which no longer exists in any living brain; even the shadows are not of this time and sun, but of a world forgotten, that never knew steam or electricity or magnetism or -- kerosene oil! Also in the boom of the big bell there is a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far-away from all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them make me afraid,-- deliciously afraid. Never do I hear that billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost,-- a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths and births. I hope to remain within hearing of that bell... And, considering the possibility of being doomed to the state of a Jiki-ketsu-gaki [hungry ghost]. I want to have my chance of being reborn in some bamboo flower-cup, or mizutame, whence I might issue softly, singing my thin and pungent song, to bite some people that I know.

I think Nixon could probably relate to the "bite some people that I know" part, but I doubt if he ever reached the serenity Hearn seems to have achieved.

There's a great (though kinda long) Kenneth Rexroth article about him
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/hearn.htm
I love the quote from a letter Hearn wrote in 1893: “The great point is to touch with simple words.”