Valentines from the Beyond

It is an exquisite and beautiful thing in our nature, that when the heart is touched and softened by some tranquil happiness or affectionate feeling, the memory of the dead comes over it most powerfully and irresistibly. It would seem as though our better thoughts and sympathies were charms, in virtue of which the soul is enabled to hold some vague and mysterious intercourse with the spirits of those whom we dearly loved in life. Alas! how often and how long may those patient angels hover above us, watching for the spell which is so seldom uttered, and so soon forgotten! — Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

Snittle Timberry

It is tempting — almost aggressively so, in the way that certain sentiments arrive pre-wrapped in violins and sepia — to dismiss Dickens’s flowery observation here as one more instance of Victorian lushness, the emotional equivalent of an overstuffed parlour where every surface bristles with antimacassars and grief is given a chaise longue upon which to recline theatrically. But to do so would be to miss something both subtler and stranger in what the then 27-year-old toast of London was anatomizing in his third novel. Because what Dickens is really pointing to is not mere melancholy, nor even nostalgia, but a structural feature of consciousness: that happiness, particularly the quiet, unadvertised kind, opens a trapdoor in the floor of the present through which the dead rise up — not as spectres, not even as memories in the cinematic sense, but as presences that feel less retrieved than admitted.

Notice the conditions he sets. The heart must be “touched and softened by some tranquil happiness or affectionate feeling.” Not shattered. Not wrung out by tragedy. Not even stunned by ecstasy. It is not the hurricane of emotion that conjures the dead; it is the lull after rain. The moment when you are sitting at a kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon, sunlight diffused into that particular domestic amber, and someone across from you laughs in a way that is unguarded. The laugh does not belong to the dead. It belongs to the living. But something in its unguardedness — its lack of strategic self-presentation — dissolves the membrane that ordinarily keeps the dead in their appointed archive.

The modern temptation is to interpret this neurologically: that certain affective states increase associative recall; that oxytocin and serotonin (those twin bureaucrats of bonding) loosen the filing system in which episodic memory is housed; that grief, when not under active suppression, is opportunistic. All of which may be true, but also insufficient. Because Dickens is not merely saying that happiness triggers recollection. He is suggesting that goodness — our “better thoughts and sympathies” — functions as a kind of password. A charm. Not a spell in the Hogwarts sense (which would be gratifyingly procedural), but an ethical incantation, spoken not in syllables but in states of being.

The idea is both consoling and terrifying. Consoling, because it implies that the dead are not gone in the sense of being inaccessible; terrifying, because it makes access contingent upon our own moral clarity. The dead, in this schema, are not summoned by grief’s theatrics but by gentleness. They do not respond to the wail but to the softened heart. Which raises an uncomfortable corollary: that the dead might be hovering — Dickens’s word is exquisitely patient — above us not when we rend our garments, but when we are kind.

Hovering is a loaded term. It does not mean the souls of the departed are floating through the ether, lightly prodding the empty belly of space, peeping over house parapets and through garret windows in search of receptive shoulders on which to alight. They are not elves on shelves. Rather, the way Dickens is using the word, hovering implies proximity without intrusion. A presence that refrains from forcing itself upon us. And this is perhaps the most radical part of the observation: the dead do not demand remembrance the way the spirits who visit Scrooge demand his attention. They wait for it. They wait for us to become the kind of creatures capable of remembering them rightly.

What would it mean to remember someone rightly? Not as a curated montage of their greatest hits, nor as a shrine to grievance, nor even as a static photograph laminated against the erosions of time. To remember rightly would be to encounter them again in a moment when the self is not clenched. When we are not defending, performing, or bargaining. In such moments, the dead do not appear as unfinished business but as completed love.

There is something almost embarrassingly mystical about this, and yet it comports with ordinary experience in a way that is hard to refute. Many people report that the memory of a lost parent, sibling, friend or spouse comes most forcefully not during anniversaries or at funerals, but while washing dishes, or holding a child, or stepping into a room filled with familiar music. I myself have felt this. Willing to bet that you have, too. Dickens surely had. The trigger is rarely sorrow alone. It is connection. The psyche seems to say: Ah. This is what we were made for. And in that recognition, those who once participated in our lives, our essential being-made-for-this (there has to be a five-euro German term for this; Heidegger’s In-der-Welt-sein maybe), re-enter the frame.

One could argue that this is merely the mind’s way of stitching continuity across time — that in moments of relational warmth, we instinctively reach backward to include all who have constituted us. Needs must. And that may be. But even that account preserves Dickens’s essential intuition: that love is cumulative. That affection is not confined to the present object but radiates outward, illuminating older attachments as if they were written in ink that becomes visible only under certain light.

And then there is the melancholy coda: “how often and how long may those patient angels hover above us, watching for the spell which is so seldom uttered, and so soon forgotten!” The sorrow here is not primarily about death. It is about inattention. The spell is seldom uttered because we are seldom tranquil. Our culture, if it can be said to have a dominant emotional posture, is one of agitation — of curated outrage, monetized social media distraction, a blunderbuss of perpetual low-grade panic. The open heart is an endangered habitat. What hovers above us most of the time are screwdrivers, drills and gimlets.

If the dead require of us a certain gentleness to be encountered, then our freneticism is not merely a lifestyle choice but a kind of exile. We exile ourselves from communion with those we have loved by refusing the conditions under which such communion becomes perceptible. This is not an argument for necromancy, nor for sentimental indulgence, but for attentiveness. For the radical act of allowing happiness to be unguarded.

There is, finally, a humility in Dickens’s framing that saves it from sanctimonious piety, however much I’ve smudged the line in this clumsy essay.

The intercourse with the spirits is “vague and mysterious.” He does not claim clarity. He does not offer transcripts from beyond. What he offers is the phenomenology of a moment: the way a softened heart seems to thin the veil between now and then. Whether that veil is metaphysical or merely psychological is, in a sense, beside the point. The experience is real in its effects. It alters us. It reminds us that love, once given, does not evaporate; it lingers in the architecture of our perception.

To me, the “patient angels” are not external beings at all, but the dormant capacities within us — the capacities for gratitude, for tenderness, for remembrance without demand. They hover because we hover: between distraction and attention, between hardness and softness, between the noisy self and the permeable one.

And when, by accident or grace, we enter that permeable state — when we are briefly less armoured and “busy” than usual — the dead arrive not as accusations or as unfinished arguments, but as witnesses. Not to our grief, but to whatever good remains within us. They appear most powerfully not when we are broken, but when we are open.

This might be Dickens’s quiet, subversive consolation: that the way to remain in touch with those we have lost is not to cling more fiercely to sorrow, but to cultivate the kind of happiness that makes room for them. Happy Valentine’s Day.