The Devil's Dictionary

The Honest Pessimist

Bierce’s cynicism is not the lazy cynicism of a man who has never been tested. It is the hard-won cynicism of a man who watched thousands of people die in circumstances of confusion and terror that no official account could fully render. What he concluded was that human beings are capable of extraordinary cruelty, that their idealism is usually a form of self-deception, and that any account of reality that does not reckon with these facts is a lie.

This is not the gospel’s conclusion, but it is not entirely wrong either. The doctrine of original sin is itself a form of radical honesty about the human condition — a refusal to pretend that human beings are better than they are. Bierce arrived at something like this conclusion through experience rather than theology, and he was not wrong about what he saw. He was wrong only about whether there was anything else to see.

What An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Reveals

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is a story about a man being hanged who imagines, in the moment of his death, that he has escaped and made his way home to his wife and children — and who is then, in the final sentence, revealed to be dead. The story is Bierce’s most concentrated statement of his vision: the beautiful is an illusion, hope is a hallucination produced by a dying brain, and reality is the rope.

What the story reveals for TLA is the shape of the need it refuses to meet. The dying man’s vision — home, wife, children, the ordinary beauty of a summer day — is not nothing. It is the image of what human beings are made for. Bierce uses it to make the horror of the reality more devastating. But the image itself is a testimony: to the reality of the longing, and to the fact that the rope is not the last word that the longing deserves.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a world in which the wound is real but not final. Bierce saw the wound with extraordinary clarity and concluded that it was final. His Civil War experience gave him a precise knowledge of what human beings do to each other.

The question TLA puts to Bierce is whether he has seen everything — whether the wound is the whole story, or only its most visible feature. The rope is not the last sentence in the story. Bierce could render the wound with devastating precision. What he could not render was the promise that the wound will be healed — because he had no language for resurrection.

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