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    A Cynic Looks at Life
    A Cynic Looks at Life
    A Cynic Looks at Life
    Ebook68 pages57 minutes

    A Cynic Looks at Life

    By Ambrose Bierce

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    About this ebook

    Ambrose Bierce was well known for his biting wit and cynical approach to life. Here is a collection of essays which showcases this great writers outlook on life, love, power and politics.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateMar 31, 2016
    ISBN9781473360242
    Author

    Ambrose Bierce

    Ambrose Bierce was an American writer, critic and war veteran. Bierce fought for the Union Army during the American Civil War, eventually rising to the rank of brevet major before resigning from the Army following an 1866 expedition across the Great Plains. Bierce’s harrowing experiences during the Civil War, particularly those at the Battle of Shiloh, shaped a writing career that included editorials, novels, short stories and poetry. Among his most famous works are “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “The Boarded Window,” “Chickamauga,” and What I Saw of Shiloh. While on a tour of Civil-War battlefields in 1913, Bierce is believed to have joined Pancho Villa’s army before disappearing in the chaos of the Mexican Revolution.

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      Book preview

      A Cynic Looks at Life - Ambrose Bierce

      A Cynic Looks at Life

      By

      Ambrose Bierce

      Copyright © 2016 Read Books Ltd.

      This book is copyright and may not be

      reproduced or copied in any way without

      the express permission of the publisher in writing

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Contents

      Ambrose Bierce

      CIVILIZATION

      I

      II

      III

      THE GIFT O’ GAB

      NATURA BENIGNA

      THE DEATH PENALTY

      I

      II

      III

      IV

      V

      IMMORTALITY

      EMANCIPATED WOMAN

      A MAD WORLD

      EPIGRAMS OF A CYNIC

      Ambrose Bierce

      Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born in Meigs County, Ohio, United States in 1842. He was the tenth of thirteen children, and left home aged fifteen to become a ‘printer’s devil’ (a printing apprentice) at a small Ohio newspaper. Bierce fought in the American Civil War, working as a topographical engineer and even reaching the rank of brevet major before resigning from the Army to settle in San Francisco. During the 1870s and 1880s, he worked on a variety of newspapers, even spending three years in England, and famously helped quash a bill which would have put the cost of the First Transcontinental Railroad on the American people instead of the railroad companies.

      Through his newspaper output – including one of the first regular columns in William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner – Bierce developed a famous reputation for searing criticism and acerbic wit, even earning the nickname ‘Bitter Bierce’. His satirical reference book, The Devil’s Dictionary, which lampooned cant and political doublespeak – Corporation (n.) An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility

      – remains widely read today. However, Bierce is critically best remembered for his fiction. Indeed, many of his short stories – such as ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, ‘The Boarded Window’, ‘Killed at Resaca’ and ‘Chickamauga’, all of which are penned in ‘Pure English’ – are held among the best of the 19th century. Bierce’s writings are also generally regarded as some of the best war writings of all time.

      Bierce’s death was a mysterious one, which continues to intrigue people to this day: In October 1913, aged 71, Bierce left Washington, D.C., for a tour of his old Civil War battlefields. He got as far as the Mexican city of Chihuahua, where he wrote a letter to a close friend, dated 26th December, 1913, in which he said I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination. After this he vanished, becoming one of the most famous disappearances in American literary history.

      CIVILIZATION

      I

      The question Does civilization civilize? is a fine example of petitio principii, and decides itself in the affirmative; for civilization must needs do that from the doing of which it has its name. But it is not necessary to suppose that he who propounds is either unconscious of his lapse in logic or desirous of digging a pitfall for the feet of those who discuss; I take it he simply wishes to put the matter in an impressive way, and relies upon a certain degree of intelligence in the interpretation.

      Concerning uncivilized peoples we know but little except what we are told by travelers—who, speaking generally, can know very little but the fact of uncivilization, as shown in externals and irrelevances, and are moreover, greatly given to lying. From the savages we hear very little. Judging them in all things by our own standards in default of a knowledge of theirs, we necessarily condemn, disparage and belittle. One thing that civilization certainly has not done is to make us intelligent enough to understand that the contrary of a virtue is not necessarily a vice. Because, as a rule, we have but one wife and several mistresses each it is not certain that polygamy is everywhere—nor, for that matter, anywhere—either wrong or inexpedient. Because the brutality of the civilized slave owners and dealers created a conquering sentiment against slavery it is not intelligent to assume that slavery is a maleficent thing amongst Oriental peoples (for example) where the slave is not oppressed. Some of these same Orientals whom we are pleased to term half-civilized have no regard for truth. Takest thou me for a Christian dog, said one of them, that I should be the slave of my word? So far as I can perceive, the Christian dog is no more the slave of his word than the True Believer, and I think the savage—allowing for the fact that his inveracity has dominion over fewer things—as great a liar as either of them. For my part, I do not know what, in all circumstances, is right or wrong; but I know that,

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