 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||||||
His meager childhood was brightened, and he was ultimately empowered by his father, who gave him the love of history and literature. At 19 he enlisted, and was seared by his experiences in the Civil War, where he served with distinction. Afterwards, he wrote over a thousand columns for various newspapers. William Randolph Hearst secured him as soon as he acquired the San Francisco Examiner. There he stayed for over 20 years. All the while Bierce wrote war stories, horror stories, novels, and short stories of the mysterious and the macabre. Apparently he wrote because he had to, to get it out, to deal with it, to survive the impact of the Civil War on his life — he had to tell of the headless corpses, the boar-eaten bodies of the fallen men, the blood, the screams. Bierce wrote of the insanity to keep depression from taking him. He challenged his country to become civilized enough to admit its hypocrisies, pretensions and its crassness.
He always wanted one word to do the work of four. He garnished his newspaper columns with “definitions” of various words. In 1906 he gathered them together in the Devil's Dictionary which continues to be re-published as one of the greatest in 19th century satire. A sampling —
Birth, n. The first and direst of all disas-ters.
Clairvoyant, n. A person … who has the power of seeing that
which is invisible to her patron — namely that he is a blockhead.
Deluge, n. A notable first experiment in baptism which washed
away the sins (and sinners) of the world.
Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who
speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship
something he can see and feel.
Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in
behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.
Rack, n. An argumentative instrument formerly much used in persuading
devotees of a false faith to embrace the living truth.
Redemption, n. Deliverance of sinners from the penalty of their
sin through their murder of the deity against whom they sinned. The doctrine
of Redemption is the fundamental mystery of our holy religions, and whoso
believeth in it shall not perish, but have everlasting life in which to
try to understand it.
Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance
the nature of the Unknowable.
Reliquary, n. A receptacle for such sacred objects as pieces
of the true cross, short-ribs of saints, the ears of Balaam’s ass, the
lung of the cock that called Peter to repentance, and so forth. Reliquaries
are commonly of metal, and provided with a lock to prevent the contents
from coming out and performing miracles at unseasonable times.
Revelation, n. A famous book in which St. John the Divine concealed
all that he knew. The revealing is done by the commentators, who know nothing.
Saint, n. A dead sinner, revised and edited.
Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished
from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
Ambrose Bierce chaffed at this world as long as he could, but after
losing his wife to divorce and two sons to death, the asthmatic, superstitious,
bilious atheist felt compelled to write his friends of his premonition
of approaching death. Soon he would vanish with few clues. Most of his
biographers believe, at age 71, he went to assist Pancho Villa and his
rebel army in the struggle to unseat the corrupt church-state government
of revolutionary Mexico. Others claim his “life’s fitful fever”
ended in a Grand Canyon suicide. His thoughts, his humor, his wit, and
his social criticism remain.
"Ambrose Bierce" is copyright © 1999 by John Patrick Michael
Murphy.
The electronic version is copyright © 1999 Internet Infidels
with the written permission of John Patrick Michael Murphy.
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
Copyright© Internet Infidels® 1995-Present. All rights reserved.
|
