Halloween

The ritual of Halloween as an image of life

Footnotes is a series of essays that build on each other. This one is part of a chapter on the idea of retreat and Halloween. If you haven't read it already, I recommend starting here.

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⩩ 18

In the ritual of Halloween as I see it there are three moments: trick-or-treating, going home and looking at what you got. The work, the turn and the review. Going from door to door and house to house, the trick-or-treater collects something at each, a piece of candy, a treat, or else fails to collect, collects nothing, a trick. As she goes on her basket becomes full and she becomes tired, until at some point she crosses a threshold, she says enough and turns around and goes home. When she gets there, she pours her basket out onto the floor and looks over what she has collected.

The main reason I like this image of Halloween is that it pictures so clearly the act of retreat — as going home — and the act of review and reflection that happens when you get there. But a supplementary reason I like it is that it can be imaginatively manipulated to picture what happens when retreat is lacking, the opposite of retreat, when you should go home and you don’t. Imagine a trick-or-treater who doesn’t know her basket is full, and keeps on trick-or-treating. For each goody thrown into the basket, one falls out, so that her path is littered with casualties.

This is exactly what happens whenever a means becomes an end in itself, a result habit makes inevitable, and going from house to house is such a habit. In the conceptual language of the image, collecting and looking over are activities, and going home is the pivot between them. Underlying the activity of collecting is the connection between going to a door and getting something good, a treat. The impulse underlying collecting — that a door is good, or a would-be good — settles into going to a door being good in itself: going to a door is good. This is why going home is such a drama.

In this - a third reason I like the image - it gives us a picture of all of life. In philosophical terms, collecting the goods is experiencing, looking them over is thinking. And however different they are from each other, experience and thinking need each other and, with judgment, make up one whole. Where there is no prospect of experience to come, there is nothing for judgment to do. To pass through the entire scale, to turn over from one to the next, to the next, always onward — this is our health. For this we need to hear our enough.

I apply this to my relationship to books. I read books, wanted to read more, but eventually I had to stop to ask myself, why? Why do I want to read books? What was I supposed to get out of them in the first place? What am I actually looking for? Perhaps my basket has been spilling over for some time. Perhaps I should just give up reading them for a while. Perhaps I should go home.

We are trick-or-treaters. The knocking on the front door, the going from house to house, finally the going home. Only the doors we knock on are more various, the streets we walk up more winding, the neighborhoods we wander through larger, more spacious, and above all easier to get lost in. And, costumes? Who could deny that we put on costumes just like she does? What are our suits and robes and jackets? What are our daily work and effort but the doors we knock on? What are the days themselves but houses we visit?

There is a spontaneous capacity to create meaning in images, which is very important not only to describe but to employ. I mean image-making, metaphor and myth. Seeing a trick-or-treater, someone else as a trick-or-treater, soon enough we are bound to see ourselves as trick-or-treaters.

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You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 18, from the third chapter, on Retreat. Here are some highlights from what came before.

Firsthand

⩩ 16 Revelation

⩩ 14 Yourself

⩩ 12 Learning

⩩10 Habit

⩩ 9 Firsthand

Stagestranger

⩩ 7 Mistake

⩩ 6 Whim

⩩ 3 Speechless

⩩ 1 Headsup

If you enjoyed one of them or the series as a whole, please consider passing it along to a friend. And if a friend passed it along to you, welcome. By subscribing you can have these notes delivered to your inbox, too. If you would like, stay abreast.

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A shoutout as usual to Danny at breakfastswerved for his ink. See his drawings for the series here.

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If you’ve come this far: thank you for reading my work and spending time with me. I would love to hear from you.