"Edgar Allan Poe - The Premature Burial" - читать интересную книгу автора (Poe Edgar Allan)

The Premature Burial

Edgar Allan Poe





There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but
which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate
fiction. These the mere romanticist must eschew, if he do not wish
to offend or to disgust. They are with propriety handled only when the
severity and majesty of Truth sanctify and sustain them. We thrill,
for example, with the most intense of "pleasurable pain" over the
accounts of the Passage of the Beresina, of the Earthquake at
Lisbon, of the Plague at London, of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew,
or of the stifling of the hundred and twenty-three prisoners in the
Black Hole at Calcutta. But in these accounts it is the fact- it is
the reality- it is the history which excites. As inventions, we should
regard them with simple abhorrence.
I have mentioned some few of the more prominent and august
calamities on record; but in these it is the extent, not less than the
character of the calamity, which so vividly impresses the fancy. I
need not remind the reader that, from the long and weird catalogue
of human miseries, I might have selected many individual instances
more replete with essential suffering than any of these vast
generalities of disaster. The true wretchedness, indeed- the
ultimate woe- is particular, not diffuse. That the ghastly extremes of
agony are endured by man the unit, and never by man the mass- for this
let us thank a merciful God!
To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of
these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.
That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be
denied by those who think. The boundaries which divide Life from Death
are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and
where the other begins? We know that there are diseases in which occur
total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in
which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly so called.
They are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism. A
certain period elapses, and some unseen mysterious principle again
sets in motion the magic pinions and the wizard wheels. The silver
cord was not for ever loosed, nor the golden bowl irreparably
broken. But where, meantime, was the soul?
Apart, however, from the inevitable conclusion, a priori that such
causes must produce such effects- that the well-known occurrence of
such cases of suspended animation must naturally give rise, now and
then, to premature interments- apart from this consideration, we
have the direct testimony of medical and ordinary experience to
prove that a vast number of such interments have actually taken place.
I might refer at once, if necessary to a hundred well authenticated