The play Ghosts by the 19th-century Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen has not lost its relevance over the years. Its story and the issues it raises remain strikingly contemporary today. Mrs. Alving, a middle-aged widow, is preparing to open an asylum named after her late husband, Chamberlain Alving. Yet she finds herself surrounded by the ghosts of the past:
“We carry within us a multitude of inherited dead commandments, lifeless and outdated ideas and prejudices that have lost their vitality, yet are so deeply rooted in us that we cannot free ourselves from them. These are hereditary ghosts, and since we cannot escape them, the whole world has turned into ghosts.”
It is time to realize that an ending is the beginning of something important, and that we should always wish to begin something new.
