But while they vanished from written history, archaeological clues hint that their spirit remained very much alive.
"Suddenly, when a spectrum sale seemed a fait accompli as a payment on the debt, it vanished," Mr. Wheeler wrote.
Not long before he vanished, he wrote to his wife, "But for the Occult side — everything else is peripheral, I scarcely see how anyone could do these expeditions".
And vanished is writing that might help us to reacquire, even temporarily, the sense of inhabitation and attunement out of which modernity has hustled us.
"My fears of the dark vanished," he writes about the change he felt after becoming a father, "as if they had been loneliness unable to express itself".
"DeGrom has vanished!" I wrote in my notebook in the second, Oh-my-Godding on my own only he hadn't.
"When she vanished," she writes of the unseen title character, "it almost seemed like something from a fairy tale, as though she were one of Grimms' twelve dancing princesses".
Written in a style much influenced by the Latin American magic realism of the day, the novel had a central metaphor that seemed to me brilliantly simple and effective: the hero, Carlos Rueda - whose wife, a journalist, has vanished after writing a modestly critical article - wakes up one day (much in the way that Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis wakes up as a beetle) with clairvoyant powers.
Graduate students get even lower pay than postdocs, but after adding in the often hefty tuition payments that PIs generally must cover, this "cost advantage can quickly vanish," Stephan writes.
In the letter the librarian praised her books, "Vanished" (which she wrote), "The Waiting Room" (which I wrote), and "Beloved" (which Toni Morrison wrote).
