"Remembrance Of Lives Past"

by Zoe Pollock

Clare Stein gives reincarnation the literary treatment:

In Joyce’s Ulysses, Molly Bloom mispronounces metempsychosis as “met him pike hoses.” In some cases, this is what the eagerness to believe in reincarnation strikes me as: a mispronunciation of the Collective Unconscious, or something like it. The wealth of history inhabiting the places we like to claim as exclusively ours– mistaken for immortality.