The story from China is that 11 men were recently arrested for the dark business of exhuming the bodies of women (the fresher, the better) from graveyards and selling them on a market that meets the needs of families in the difficulty of having on their hands a beloved uncle or son who exited the state of all affairs unmarried. When a deal is settled, the body of the dead woman (who may have been married in life) is buried next to the dead bachelor. This is called a ghost wedding, and the resulting marriage is certainly more peaceful than anything you will find in the land of the quick.

Though the practice is very old and maintained mostly by people who live in rural China, it is by no means barbaric. Indeed, because civilization only begins when the living live with their dead—meaning, when the living are settled rather than nomadic, we can see in the ghost marriage something like the deep and wonderfully twisted roots of the modern urban consciousness.

The city is about a very close relationship between inhabitants who are made of matter and those made from the faintest stuff of memories—ghosts. Inhabited and uninhabited buildings, rooms, hallways, staircases are all haunted by those lost in the past of those buildings, rooms, hallways, and staircases. You can only remove ghosts by demolishing a building. This is why it is utterly ridiculous to fear ghosts in the forests. What is there to haunt? Trees? Moose? Mud? What nonsense. Humans are the haunted animal. Humans live in houses, apartments, castles, and the cities of their dead.