The Maddening Mechanism of Thought.
Who would imagine, after reading the following, that when death has broken the case, seized the pendulum, and silenced the “clicking of the terrible escapement,” the maddening mechanism of thought is strengthened and accelerated a thousand-fold, as popular theology would have us believe? Such is not the law of mechanics as illustrated by any other piece of machinery. Mr. Holmes has come well nigh bearing testimony in favor of the Bible doctrine of the unconscious state of the dead:— Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The angel of life winds them up once for all, then closes the case and gives the key into the hands of the angel of resurrection. Tic-tac! tic-tac! go the wheels of thought; our will cannot stop them; they cannot stop themselves; sleep cannot still them; madness only makes them go faster; death alone can break into the case, and seizing the ever swinging pendulum, which we call the heart, silence at last the clicking of the terrible escapement we have carried so long beneath our wrinkled foreheads. If we could only get at them, as we lie on our pillows, and count the dead beats of thought after thought, and image after image jarring through the over-tired organ! Will nobody block those wheels, uncouple the pinion, cut the string that holds those weights, blow up the infernal machine with gunpowder? What a passion comes over us sometimes for silence and rest—that this dreadful mechanism, unwinding the endless tapestry of time, embroidered with spectral figures of life and death, could have but one brief holiday! Who can wonder that men swing themselves off from beams in hempen lassos? that they jump off from parapets into the swift and gurgling waters beneath? that they take counsel of the grim fiend who has but to utter his one peremptory monosyllable, and the restless machine is shivered as a case that is dashed upon a marble floor? If anybody would really contrive some kind of a lever that one could thrust in among the works of this horrid automaton and check them, or alter their rate of going, what would the world give for the discovery? Men are very apt to try to get at the machine by some indirect system or other. They clap on the brakes by means of opium, they change the maddening monotony of the rhythm by means of fermented liquors. It is because the brain is locked up and we cannot touch its movements directly, that we thrust these coarse tools in through any crevice by which they may reach the interior, alter its rate of going for a while, and at last spoil the machine.—Oliver Wendell Holmes.