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Seance table trick rattling11/8/2023 Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Psychical Society, an ASPR splinter group led by vehement debunker Joseph Rinn, announced a $10,000 prize for the contents of the apocryphal letter. If a medium could channel the text of the letter, this would prove the reality of the spirit world. Supposedly, James had left a sealed letter in a safe. Within a month of his passing, headlines announced a secret pact between William James and James Hervey Hyslop, the president of the ASPR. Indeed, after his death, the philosopher’s worst fears about the cheapening of his intellectual legacy unfolded in the pages of American newspapers from Hartford to Portland to Miami. This left him uneasy, as he rushed to complete a final work that would defend pragmatism against its critics. Towards the end of his career, James risked trading his reputation as “the greatest thinker since Emerson” for that of “a man best known for his investigations of psychic phenomena” due to his support for the controversial medium Leonora Piper. The American public knew the Harvard philosopher well through his influential lectures, textbooks, and newspaper appearances, forums in which he defined the emerging science of psychology and weighed in on ethics and politics. 3 A regular attendee of séances, James learned that contact with the living could be more difficult than contacting the dead. Never a data hound, he admitted to letting the correspondence “get into arrears”, while the correspondents themselves “obstinately refused to reply in a great many cases”. not due to any external cause?” It was the remaining 852 cases that would bog him down for years in what he called a “terribly slouchy piece of work”: trying to coax names, dates, corroborating testimony, or any response at all from the yeses. Fortunately for James, 5,459 people answered no to the question, “Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had the vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being. Two decades before William James’ death, the ASPR - which was meant to serve as a public archive of psychical experiences, an extended recording device for the nation’s liminal states - had tallied 6,311 responses to the Census of Hallucinations that he launched in the United States. “His death changes and blights everything for me”, Henry wrote, staggering under the weight and finality of loss. 2 The elder brother was a pillar shoring up Henry’s unstable emotions. This ending left Henry James “in darkness. Sixty-eight years of chaotic comings and goings, restless transmissions, had come to an end. In constant pain, he could no longer walk and had to be carried on a litter. Yet, as his brother and wife rushed him across the Atlantic after another failed Alpine rest cure, it became clear to all of them that it would be his last return to New England. His gasping for breath was “partly a spasmodic phenomenon”, he insisted, something in the mind. If only he could overcome the growing anxiety that his major contributions to philosophy, 1907’s Pragmatism and 1909’s A Pluralistic Universe, were being misinterpreted and poorly received. Perhaps he could still think his way out of it. The fact that he was so often sick, and the causes of his illness so obscure, made even James doubt that his heart would finally fail. “I always thought that would continue forever”, declared the irascible editor John Jay Chapman, “and I relied upon his sanctity as if it were sunlight.” 1 James’ death in August of 1910 came on quickly, though he had long suffered from ill health. It was hard for his friends to let William James go. But where am I when I’m drifting? What if no one answers the call? Over time, the people we love slip out of range. Unbeknownst to them, they’re talking me back into our common reality. It’s as simple as trading gossip with my high school best friend or an old roommate. Unmoored, I take my cell phone out of my pocket and call whoever will answer. Traffic, bodegas, the cartoon animals on children’s backpacks wash over me, meaning obscured by a curtain of sheer sensory noise. I have my feet in other people’s inner worlds, their yearnings and anxieties are mine. Walking out of the icy American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) library into the sunset-saturated clamor of evening on the Upper West Side, I feel like a shade among the living. People ask if I believe in ghosts, and I can always tell if they’re asking because they experience reality as haunted in some way, or because they think I’ve fixed on a wrong idea. I’ve been writing a book about a failed and forgotten science, poring over the testimony of people who saw and heard impossible things, for years now.
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