The Plato Papers Read Online Free PDF

terror and despair’. They were prone to the most extreme sensations of wonder or hilarity and there seems to have been an unusual amount of lunacy among the young.
    Their fear of premature burial has already been discussed, but it was accompanied by a sense of sin and evil so strong that many believed that they were already damned. All the thoughts of Americans were upon death. Why such a wealthy and aristocratic people should have been so susceptible to morbid dread, and why they chose to live among so many intimations of gloom and decay, are still questions to be resolved. It has been suggested that they suffered from some general and inherited disease that caused them to shrink from bright light, for example, and that kept them enclosed within their mansions. But there may be another explanation.
    May I quote from the Poet’s own words? ‘And then, after the lapse of sixty minutes (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies), there came yet another chiming of the clock and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before.’ Some of you are bewildered. A ‘clock’ was a mechanical system that manufactured this ‘Time’. There may originally have been covered markets from which Time was distributed to the people but, in the period when the Poet wrote his history, the mechanisms were so compact that it could be produced by means of various wheels and dials. There is also mentioned, within the same account, the object known as a ‘pendulum’ attached to this clock. There is even a ‘pit’ where Time itself was stored.
    All the evidence, therefore, suggests that the Americans considered Time to be an indispensable element of their existence. There is in the text a toast or homage to this deity, with the refrain ‘Time, gentlemen, please’. It was also, perhaps, a visible being. I have already mentioned that the Poet writes of ‘the Time that flies’, which suggests that they saw winged or hastening figures; this may also explain the references, on several occasions, to ‘muffled’ or ‘low indefinite sounds’, which we interpret as the noise of footsteps or of beating wings. But at this point we confess ourselves to be intrigued by that passage describing the ‘disconcert and tremulousness and meditation’ which Time instilled within the people. They trembled in its presence and as it ‘flew’ it gave them cause for anxious contemplation. But even though it was by no means a beneficent agency, they believed that it was in some obscure sense part of their own bodies. The beating of the human heart, for example, is compared to such sounds as ‘a watch makes when enveloped in cotton’. A ‘watch’ was that part of the clock which stared at its owner, and was sometimes known as its ‘face’.
    Another paragraph in ‘Tales and Histories’ anticipates the discoveries of a much later period. After the mansions of the American people have been described, it is suggested that these splendid houses ‘moulded the destinies’ of those who inhabited them; they contained ‘an atmosphere peculiar to themselves’ which wielded ‘an importunate and terrible influence’ upon those who dwelled in them. Curious, is it not? This historian of ancient days might easily be mistaken for a prophet! But then we read this: ‘I am heartily sick of this life and of the nineteenth century in general. I am convinced that everything is going wrong.’ Ponder these words, which manifest such a great sense of woe and loss. The conclusion is more poignant still. ‘I will get embalmed for a couple of hundred years.’ There of course is the pathos and also the irony. If the Poet were indeed revived, two hundred years later, the Age of Mouldwarp would still be in existence with all its degraded power. But although it was a barren and oppressive epoch, the work before us confirms that even then there were intimations and gleams of another life which would eventually