The Need To Believe

One of a series of essays on the supernatural for the most recent issue of Lapham's Quarterly, Colin Dickey contemplates mourning:

In the wake of her husband’s death, Joan Didion repeatedly caught herself trying to employ magic as a means of coping with the loss. She describes being unable to give away certain of his possessions, as though their contagious power might yet bring him back. … For Didion, mourning lay precisely in this struggle, rational versus the magical, the working through of grief versus the hope against hope that death can be overcome. Our attitudes toward sympathetic magic haven’t really changed, though this battle—the age-old conflict between logical authority and childish magic—has for many of us, like Didion, become internalized, the two halves of our brain working at odds with each other. There’s nothing particularly disordered or childish in any of this. We turn to magic because sometimes it’s all we have; in the face of things beyond our control, magical thinking remains that last bit of hope that we’ll always have at our disposal.