Poe: Disturbing and Disturbed

It goes without saying that Edgar Allan Poe was a unique figure in world history.  In particular, Poe, best known today for his macabre short stories, was by all accounts a most mysterious and terrifying person. Here’s an article exploring the author’s eerie prescience about the world around him.

While I hope you’ll find it entertaining, the real reason I bring it up is the following quote:

I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary…

Yikes, that’s a more gruesome thought than anything you’ll find in the “Pit and the Pendulum” or the “Cask of Amontillado.”  Yet it really doesn’t ring true, does it?  Yes, our civilization faces grave challenges, but just think for a moment of where it would be without the efforts of great people to move it out of the Dark Ages, overthrow tyrants, establish rule of law, and to build a more rational world.

Without people of kindness and decency, working with their sleeves rolled up, we would have long ago entered world fascism.  Of course, there are people who, after the Republic National Convention, believe that’s where we’re headed whether we like it or not.

Again, I don’t see it.  As I tell my colleagues overseas who are scratching their heads, asking me how is it possible that sensibilities of Americans have fallen so quickly and so far, “Give us a chance.  We have some ignorant and mean-spirited people here, but they are nowhere near a majority.”  I sure hope I’m right.