The earthly afterlife of creative people, the “influential dead”

…If we are attentive enough to our inner lives, we can each recognize the influential dead living within us, whose life's work has shaped and is shaping our own. (Figuring most dominantly in my own private retinue are Rachel Carson, Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Thomas, Carl Sagan, and Rilke.) Those who attain such immortality, Butler intimates, are passionate lovers of life, enamored with all the dazzlements of nature and human nature…
https://www.themarginalian.org/