Sympathy of Souls

Do you believe in reincarnation? I'm not sure how I feel. My romantic side immediately stakes it's territory, refusing to believe that life can simply end. It wants to believe that the people in my life are there because they are meant to be. Fated. Endlessly intertwined. Then my practical side rushes to the fore, wagging it's metaphorical finger and telling me not to be so silly. Death is an end. Period. My creative side, of course, thinks that the ability to reincarnate is so much more of an interesting choice.

At the risk of sounding overly fanciful and new-agey, I believe I have what, for a lack of better words, might be called a sympathy with different historical periods. I don't imagine I was a princess in a tower pining for a lost love, or a president's wife quietly ruling a country from a seemingly subservient role. (Why do people who believe they are reincarnated always assume that they were someone extraordinary in their past lives? For surely if I lived before, I came from peasant stock.)

But I don't know how to explain why music from the forties breaks my heart as if I was personally affected by the war. How picking up a long skirt so that I could run up a grand staircase without tripping seemed oddly familiar. How every time I visit the ocean, it feels like I've come home and yet I've never lived near water. Why the Claddagh ring is ridiculously important to me (I have some Irish background, but it's mixed in with Scottish, German and Russian and no doubt many others). Why hearing words like Old Bailey, or Ludgate, or Fleet Street make my blood race.

I call it a sympathy, because I just finished reading Mary Novik's Conceit (Random House). It's such an interesting novel. I didn't warm to it right away, but somehow somewhere in the middle, I realized that I was really enjoying it. It kind of gave me the comfortable feel of Pride and Prejudice meets Little Women. But what really stood out to me, and what I think makes this novel worth reading, regardless of what you think of the story itself (I preferred the secondary story of John Donne and Ann More to the trials and tribulations of the central Pegge), is the author's voice. She manages to write as if she is actually from 17-century England. I've read many plays from that time period, and if I didn't know from the flap that Novik is Canadian and still alive, I would have thought that this book was written back then. It's remarkable. Authors can do extensive research, but it doesn't mean they can pull that off.

As I was coming to the end, I read this passage:

..two lutes, being both strung and tuned to an equal pitch, and then one played upon, the other will, like an echo to a trumpet, warble a faint audible harmony in answer to the same tune, yet many will not believe there is any such thing as a sympathy of souls. (pg 346)

The author was talking about love, not reincarnation, but the phrase struck a chord. This sympathy of souls describes how I feel connected to a past that I never experienced. Is this reincarnation? Is this a scholar who has done too much study on a particular subject? Is this a woman who reads too many historical romances and uses sympathy with the past as an excuse for not fitting in to the present?