Ambrose Bierce may always be condemned to...if not complete obscurity, then a kind of renown limited to literary hipsters. Everyone knows about his mysterious late-in-life disappearance. His fiction, much less so. While his stories are brilliant and quite readable, they're most often out of print. And unlike Poe's tales they're not well-suited to being spun out into 90 minute fantasias, so if they're adapted into anything it will likely be short films. Lucky break that one of those shorts got a second run as a Twilight Zone.
Anyway, his witticisms are still available to all. Here are a couple I like.
“There’s no free will,” says the philosopher
”To hang is most unjust.”
”There is no free will,” assents the officer
”We hang because we must.”
Meeting Merit on a street-crossing, Success stood still. Merit stepped off into the mud and went around him, bowing his apologies, which Success had the grace to accept.
1 comment:
I've enjoyed what I've seen of Ambrose Bierce's work - The Devil's Dictionary is a treasure. What a shame it was that it was so good many people plagiarized it.. some without giving him any credit. Here are just a few particularly entertaining ones found on wiki:
Air : A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful providence for the fattening of the poor.
Cannon: An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.
Conservative: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
It was strange that he disappeared into Mexico never to be seen again. He likely got sick and didn't recover - hopefully, some kind person took care of him.
We saw An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge last winter - it was one of the better Twilight Zone episodes.
I noticed the first Bierce witticism is in verse - clever.
The second one, of course, is the way things in this world so often go when Merit regularly loses out to privilege.
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From Jer
well, better 10 years late than never. truly stunning:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3lF2qEA2cw&ab_channel=PostmodernJukebox
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