Monday, March 21, 2005

The File: Gulp

First they saw bones--human bones--littering the thwarts and floorboards, as if the whaleboat were the seagoing lair of a ferocious, man-eating beast. Then they saw the two men. They were curled up in opposite ends of the boat, their skin covered in sores, their eyes bulging from the hollows of their skulls, their beards caked with salt and blood. They were sucking the marrow from the bones of their dead shipmates.

Instead of greeting their rescuers with smiles of relief, the survivors--too delirious with thirst and hunger to speak--were disturbed, even frightened. They jealously clutched the splintered and gnawed-over bones with a desperate, almost feral intensity, refusing to give them up, like two starving dogs found trapped in a pit.
-- Nathaniel Philbrick, In The Heart Of The Sea: The Tragedy Of The Whaleship Essex, pp. xii-xiii

I think the amazing thing about the experience of the Essex survivors is not so much the horror--although I'll return to that shortly--but the fact that these two men were able to survive the hardship and mental anguish and yet go on to live long, normal lives. They returned to their families and occupations without the benefit of therapy, decompression, or even modern dentistry. I find that more interesting than the fact that their pockets were filled with fingerbones when they were finally rescued.

As for horror, the only thing I find repulsive is my own morbid interest. In my defense I'm basically making a writer's scrapbook available on the web, a catalog of the extreme, but the excuse, I fear, doesn't count for much. When I was little my dad told me that people are fascinated by evil. I presume this accounts for the mainstream media.

11:27:07 PM    comment []

Word of the Day: Guess Who!

mor·ga·nat·ic adj.

Of or being a legal marriage between a person of royal or noble birth and a partner of lower rank, in which it is agreed that no titles or estates of the royal or noble partner are to be shared by the partner of inferior rank nor by any of the offspring of the marriage.
-- Dictionary.com

10:27:02 PM    comment []