"Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be."
"Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient."
"Past, n. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the Future is the realm of song. In the one crouches Memory, clad in sackcloth and ashes, mumbling penitential prayer; in the sunshine of the other Hope flies with a free wing, beckoning to temples of success and bowers of ease. Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one--the knowledge and the dream."
"You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute. You are avenged 1440 times a day."
"On every side of me stretched a bleak and desolate expanse of plain, covered with a tall overgrowth of sere grass, which rustled and whistled in the autumn wind with heaven knows what mysterious and disquieting suggestion. Protruded at long intervals above it, stood strangely shaped and somber-colored rocks, which seemed to have an understanding with one another and to exchange looks of uncomfortable significance, as if they had reared their heads to watch the issue of some foreseen event. A few blasted trees here and there appeared as leaders in this malevolent conspiracy of silent expectation."
Ambrose Bierce (1842 – c.1914) had a human skull in his study, always carried a pistol, and probably wandered off into revolutionary Mexico at seventy-one years old never to return. According to the Internet, his personal motto was "Nothing Matters." The image of the "Bitter Bierce" is so vivid that the typing almost writes itself. An unusually "pure" ILI, he saw through all of humanity and described it in the precision of his writing style. His work is a series of sharp observations rather than a systematic philosophy. To the extent there is a global anything at all, it's a global ethical worldview.
Today, he's most famous for The Devil's Dictionary. Its method is to take each of polite society's cherished words and, with substantial amounts of irony, strip it to the cold truth: a lawyer is "one skilled in circumvention of the law", faith is "belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge", a conservative is "a statesman who is enamoured of existing evils", while a liberal is someone who is enamoured of new ones. And the format is itself the joke, in the dry, structural way the type prefers — he chose the dictionary, the most authoritative of genres, to weaponize it against itself. Even his own self-image, he supplied as a definition: the cynic whose "faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." With mixes success, the Dictionary received some modern additions, e.g. "AI, n. A sophisticated technology engineered to confidently produce errors that would previously take a human hours of painstaking work to invent."
His fiction constantly explores fate, death, and the unknown, showing a strong focus on internal visions and possible futures. The Civil War stories — "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" above all — are masterpieces of the trick ending, the narrative that lets a man believe he has escaped death only to reveal, in the final line, that the rope broke his neck pages ago and the escape was the last firing of a dying brain. These narrative devices are Ni in its additionally "negativistic" mode: the apparent future dissolving into the foreordained end, the structure of the tale built so that death was always already the truth, negating the illusory hope. "The Death of Halpin Frayser" turns the same vision inward, into the uncanny. Frayser wanders a nightmare landscape, writes a poem in his sleep in his own blood, and is strangled on a grave by the revenant of his own mother, in a tale where chronology and identity come loose, and that ends with the true killer still at large while the investigators stand baffled by a death that looks supernatural.
Despite the appearances, Bierce was still an idealist, and his dark works are haunted by the absence of the justice, loyalty, and decency he so clearly wanted the world to contain. A more idealistic reviewer wrote, "In some stories, his narrators commit and report on abominable crimes with an air of nonchalance or indifference. They'd kill their parents and destroy their friends without so much as a twinge of regret. I found it all alarming in the extreme." The cynicism is the scar tissue over a Fi-ish moral expectation that reality perpetually betrays. When the railroad baron Collis Huntington tried to wriggle his companies out of repaying $130 million owed to the public, and met Bierce — sent by Hearst to publicize and kill the scheme — Huntington asked what his price was. Bierce's answer was to name the entire sum owed to the nation and tell him to hand it to the Treasurer of the United States, showing that someone who is otherwise very Talanov-style ILI can, in fact, have principles or be disgusted by immorality. The contrarianism that cost him the mainstream acceptance he privately craved (he went "against the grain" in everything, and knew it cost him) is the same refusal to flatter or conform. Even his generosity ran in the type's grain: he was a real mentor to younger writers, but from above, as the magisterial judge whose verdict could make or break a career. Even the disappearance fits — he had written so many endings in which death waits unseen, and walked off to meet it himself.
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