Story 4/31
The Masque of the Red Death
By Edgar Allan Poe
(It's number ten, about half way down)
Listening Time: 13 minutes
Quote: "Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made."
Themes: Public Health, Mortality
I think that even without any social or historic points of reference, this story would still be chilling. However it particularly resonated with me because my country had just gone through something that was eerily analogous to some of the events that happen in this story.
You may have heard of this little guy:
"No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous."
If you remember the "Ebola Scare" in the United States, you already have a general idea of what Mr Poe is going for in this story.
Told within the framework of a devastating, infectious, hemorrhagic fever, it's no shock to me that someone would want to isolate themselves for protection. It's probably the first thing I'd do if Ebola became airborne and started killing everyone in my neighborhood.
But Prince Prospero goes a step further:
“The external world could take care of itself, in the meantime it was folly to grieve or to think.”
He's the type of character you'd watch in a disaster flick: the one who behaves so atrociously that literally the whole time you're waiting for him/her to die some horrible death so you can fistpump and clap.
And Poe delivers.
(Oh, boy does he!)
Mr Allan Poe is another one of those authors who doesn't want you to put his stories within a particular moral context, he just wants you to be afraid. However, I just can't help it...(I promise not all of these advents will be this way):
Whether it's by disease, violence, or age (...or, if you are a jerk like Prospero, a symbolic combination of the three...)
(Death is the great equalizer of life.)
No matter how rich or poor you are, or if you're from an affluent country or an impoverished country, a confrontation between you and death is inevitable.
So it's folly to live as if misfortune and death will not affect us. And it is evil to live without consideration of those who are suffering, especially if you have the means to relieve it in any way.
I thought I was pretty smart, thinking of the similarities between "The Red Death" and Ebola, but it turns out the CDC had already noticed the same thing, like 12 years before.
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