MDDM18: The Fam'd Leyden-Jar Danse Macabre

[Terrance]

"Tall men in a thunder-storm I avoid. Are you so grossly ignorant as not
to know, that the height of a six-footer is sufficient to discharge an
electric cloud upon him? Are not lonely Kentuckians, ploughing, smit in
the unfinished furrow? Nay, if the six-footer stand by running water,
the cloud will sometimes select him as its conductor to that running
water. Hark! Sure, yon black pinnacle is split.
Yes, a man is a good conductor. The lightning goes through and through a
man, but only peels a tree. But sir, you have kept me so long answering
your questions, that I have not yet come to business. Will you order one
of my rods?

"You pretended envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to and
from Jupiter Tonans," laughed I; "you mere man who come here to put you
and your pipestem between clay and sky, do you think that because you
can strike a bit of green light from the Leyden jar, that you can
thoroughly avert the supernal bolt? Your rod rusts, or breaks, and where
are you? Who has empowered you, you Tetzel, to peddle round your
indulgences from divine ordinations? The hairs of our heads are
numbered, and the days of our lives. In thunder as in sunshine, I stand
at ease in the hands of my God. False negotiator, away! See, the scroll
of the storm is rolled back; the house is unharmed; and
in the blue heavens I read in the rainbow, that the Deity will not, of
purpose, make war on man's earth."

"Impious wretch!" foamed the stranger, blackening in the face as the
rainbow beamed. "I will publish your infidel notions."

"Begone! move quickly! if quickly you can, you that shine forth into
sight in moist times like the worm."

The scowl grew blacker on his face; the indigo-circles enlarged round
his eyes as the storm rings round the midnight moon. He sprang upon me;
his tri-forked thing at my heart. I seized it; I snapped it; I dashed
it; I trod it; and dragging the dark lightning-king out of my door,
flung his elbowed, copper sceptre after him.
But spite of my treatment, and spite of my dissuasive talk of him to my
neighbors, the Lightning-rod man still dwells in the land; still travels
in storm-time, and drives a brave trade with the fears of man.

Melville, The Lightning-Rod Man

What's the mighty difference between holding a mast's lightning-rod in
the
storm, and standing close by a mast that hasn't got any lightning-rod at
all in a storm? Don't you see, you timber-head, that no harm can come to
the holder
of the rod, unless the mast is first struck? What are you talking about,
then? Not one ship in a hundred carries rods, and Ahab,- aye, man, and
all of us,- were
in no more danger then, in my poor opinion, than all the crews in ten
thousand ships now sailing the seas. Why, you King-Post, you, I suppose
you would
have every man in the world go about with a small lightning-rod running
up the corner of his hat, like a militia officer's skewered feather, and
trailing behind
like his sash. Why don't ye be sensible, Flask? it's easy to be
sensible; why don't ye, then? any man with half an eye can be sensible." 

Melville, M-D, Midnight - The Forecastle Bulwarks 

American Gothic Tales 

Edited and with and Introduction by
Joyce Carol Oates

Excerpt
Introduction
Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love,
the
invisible spheres were formed in fright.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, MOBY DICK

How uncanny, how mysterious, how unknowable and infinitely beyond their
control
must have seemed the vast wilderness of the New World, to the
seventeenth-century
Puritan settlers! The inscrutable silence of Nature the muteness that,
not heralding
God, must be a dominion of Satan's; the tragic ambiguity of human nature
with its
predilection for what Christians call "original sin," inherited from our
first parents,
Adam and Eve. When Nature is so vast, man's need for control—for
"settling" the
wilderness—becomes obsessive. And how powerful the temptation to project
mankind's
divided self onto the very silence of Nature. 

http://www.usfca.edu/~southerr/gothic.html