Ambrose Bierce: Mystiske Forsvindinger

Tidligere efterspurgte nogen en forklaring af Bierces teorier om mystiske forsvindinger, og det er hvad der skal præsenteres i dag. Han skrev tre korte rapporter til San Fransisco Examiner om tilfælde, hvor folk var forsvundet sporløst og i nogle tilfælde foran øjenvidner, og to år senere i 1890 kommenterede han på en tysk professors spekulationer om emnet i avisen Oakland Daily Evening Tribune. Det er denne artikel, jeg præsenterer her i dens originale udgave på engelsk, men det anbefales læseren først at tage et kig på Bierces egne historier, som Forlaget Replikant netop har udgivet i dansk oversættelse. De kan downloades til din ebogslæser (kan også læses på computeren med Adobe Digital Editions) ganske gratis lige her: http://replikant.dk/mystiske-forsvindinger/

In connection with this subject of "mysterious disappearance" - of
which every memory is stored with abundant example--it is pertinent
to note the belief of Dr. Hern, of Leipsic; not by way of
explanation, unless the reader may choose to take it so, but because
of its intrinsic interest as a singular speculation.  This
distinguished scientist has expounded his views in a book entitled
"Verschwinden und Seine Theorie," which has attracted some
attention, "particularly," says one writer, "among the followers of
Hegel, and mathematicians who hold to the actual existence of a so-
called non-Euclidean space--that is to say, of space which has more
dimensions than length, breadth, and thickness--space in which it
would be possible to tie a knot in an endless cord and to turn a
rubber ball inside out without 'a solution of its continuity,' or in
other words, without breaking or cracking it."

Dr. Hern believes that in the visible world there are void places - 
vacua, and something more - holes, as it were, through which animate
and inanimate objects may fall into the invisible world and be seen
and heard no more.  The theory is something like this:  Space is
pervaded by luminiferous ether, which is a material thing--as much a
substance as air or water, though almost infinitely more attenuated.
All force, all forms of energy must be propagated in this; every
process must take place in it which takes place at all.  But let us
suppose that cavities exist in this otherwise universal medium, as
caverns exist in the earth, or cells in a Swiss cheese.  In such a
cavity there would be absolutely nothing.  It would be such a vacuum
as cannot be artificially produced; for if we pump the air from a
receiver there remains the luminiferous ether.  Through one of these
cavities light could not pass, for there would be nothing to bear
it.  Sound could not come from it; nothing could be felt in it.  It
would not have a single one of the conditions necessary to the
action of any of our senses.  In such a void, in short, nothing
whatever could occur.  Now, in the words of the writer before
quoted--the learned doctor himself nowhere puts it so concisely:  "A
man inclosed in such a closet could neither see nor be seen; neither
hear nor be heard; neither feel nor be felt; neither live nor die,
for both life and death are processes which can take place only
where there is force, and in empty space no force could exist."  Are
these the awful conditions (some will ask) under which the friends
of the lost are to think of them as existing, and doomed forever to
exist?

Baldly and imperfectly as here stated, Dr. Hern's theory, in so far
as it professes to be an adequate explanation of "mysterious
disappearances," is open to many obvious objections; to fewer as he
states it himself in the "spacious volubility" of his book.  But
even as expounded by its author it does not explain, and in truth is
incompatible with some incidents of, the occurrences related in
these memoranda:  for example, the sound of Charles Ashmore's voice.
It is not my duty to indue facts and theories with affinity.

A.B.