"Hawthorne, Nathaniel - Egotism or The Bosom Serpent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawthorne Nathaniel)

its best to secure repose, without relinquishing evil. The victims
of his malicious remarks, it is true, had brothers enough to keep them
in countenance; for, by Roderick's theory, every mortal bosom harbored
either a brood of small serpents, or one overgrown monster, that had
devoured all the rest. Still, the city could not bear this new
apostle. It was demanded by nearly all, and particularly by the most
respectable inhabitants, that Roderick should no longer be permitted
to violate the received rules of decorum, by obtruding his own
bosom-serpent to the public gaze, and dragging those of decent
people from their lurking-places.

Accordingly, his relatives interfered, and placed him in a
private asylum for the insane. When the news was noised abroad, it was
observed that many persons walked the streets with freer countenances,
and covered their breasts less carefully with their hands.

His confinement, however, although it contributed not a little to
the peace of the town, operated unfavorably upon Roderick himself.
In solitude, his melancholy grew more black and sullen. He spent whole
days- indeed, it was his sole occupation- in communing with the
serpent. A conversation was sustained, in which, as it seemed, the
hidden monster bore a part, though unintelligibly to the listeners,
and inaudible, except in a hiss. Singular as it may appear, the
sufferer had now contracted a sort of affection for his tormentor;
mingled, however, with the intensest loathing and horror. Nor were
such discordant emotions incompatible; each, on the contrary, imparted
strength and poignancy to its opposite. Horrible love- horrible
antipathy- embracing one another in his bosom, and both
concentrating themselves upon a being that had crept into his
vitals, or been engendered there, and which was nourished with his
food, and lived upon his life, and was as intimate with him as his own
heart, and yet was the foulest of all created things! But not the less
was it the true type of a morbid nature.

Sometimes, in his moments of rage and bitter hatred against the
snake and himself, Roderick determined to be the death of him, even at
the expense of his own life. Once he attempted it by starvation.
But, while the wretched man was on the point of famishing, the monster
seemed to feed upon his heart, and to thrive and wax gamesome, as if
it were his sweetest and most congenial diet. Then he privily took a
dose of active poison, imagining that it would not fail to kill either
himself, or the devil that possessed him, or both together. Another
mistake; for if Roderick had not yet been destroyed by his own
poisoned heart, nor the snake by gnawing it, they had little to fear
from arsenic or corrosive sublimate. Indeed, the venomous pest
appeared to operate as an antidote against all other poisons. The
physicians tried to suffocate the fiend with tobacco-smoke. He
breathed it as freely as if it were his native atmosphere. Again, they
drugged their patient with opium, and drenched him with intoxicating
liquors, hoping that the snake might thus be reduced to stupor, and