Hugo Erichsen

“ At a burial there is but darkness, at a cremation rosy light unaccompanied by fustiness; the dead is really reduced to ashes, and with him the time-honored saying, “Peace to his ashes,” is not a hollow phrase, as it is with those who are interred.
Those who do not wish to miss religious and other ceremonies at incinerations may use any form of burial service they like, and those who desire to dispense with them may do so. And those who already have beloved dead in the cemeteries may rest by their side when the end is come, for the ashes can be interred as well as the body. ”

“ Instances are common in every-day life of men who cannot think to good purpose when shut up in a room with a pen, and who find their best inspiration in wandering about the streets and hearing what they want in the rattle of cabs and the seething of life around them, like the scholar of Padua, whose conditions of work are given by Montaigne as a curiosity: "I lately found one of the most learned men in France studying in the corner of a room, cut off by a screen, surrounded by a lot of riotous servants. ”

“ BURIAL ALIVE.—CREMATION FROM AN ÆSTHETIC AND RELIGIOUS POINT OF VIEW. Our great American poet, Edgar Allan Poe, says: “To be buried alive is beyond question the most terrific of all extremes which have ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.”
Is any death more horrible than this? To be embraced, unprepared, down in the deep dark grave! To awake again with the greatest longing for life, suffering the most severe bodily tortures, in the coffin! To realize that there is no escape from inevitable death! ”

“ I dislike early rising as much as any man, nor do I believe there is any moral merit in it, as the children's books pretend; but to secure an unbroken hour, or even less, I like to be at my desk before breakfast. As long before as possible I have a cup of coffee and a soda biscuit brought me there, and in the thirty to sixty minutes which follow before breakfast, I like to start the work of the day. ”

“ No thought of physical corruption jars upon our memories of the dead. The opening words of the speaker are said, a hidden choir harmoniously chants of hope and life, and now the end has come. With the words ‘ashes to ashes’ a white pall is thrown over the dais, and we have looked upon our friend for the last time. The dais noiselessly sinks from sight, a short hour is spent in listening to a funeral oration, or in contemplation, until the dais, still covered with the pall, rises from below. ”

“ If his sleep has been broken or insufficient, the day that follows is lost to his pen. He leads a sane and simple life: goes to bed at nine o'clock and gets up at five in summer and at six in winter; spends half of each day in the open air; avoids tea and coffee, tobacco, and all stimulating drinks; adheres [88] mainly to a fruit and vegetable diet, and always aims to have something to do which he can do with zest. He is fond of the mild excitement of a congenial talk, of a conversation with friends, of a walk in the fields or woods, of a row on the river, of the reading of a good book. ”

“ About the Doric pillars of its portico green vines twine fondly as if they, too, would do their share in robbing death of all its hideousness. To this place loving hands have borne the body of our friend. No coffin lends its horror to the journey from this earthly home to here, where eternal sleep awaits him. A flower-strewn bier gives poetic carriage for this short and final journey. Entering the broad portal, the soft, deep notes of an organ charm the ear. The eye takes in a most imposing sight. ”

“ Having been mostly on the wing since he began writing, he has done his work in all kinds of ways, and hours, and houses. However, now, since he has a little home, his life has become regulated. He rises at daylight, so as to save candles, and never works at night. After he has made and imbibed his coffee, he digs or pulls weeds, and cultivates his flowers, or works in some way about the greens, for an hour or so, and at length, when he feels compelled to literary work, and can no longer keep from it, he writes whatever he feels that he must set down ”

“ In the words of the learned rector of the University of Padua, Professor Coletti: “Man should disappear and not rot; he should no more be transformed into a mass of corruption—the source of filthy and injurious exhalations—than into a grotesque mummy, a shapeless mixture of pitch, resin, and perfumes; man should become a handful of ashes and nothing more.”
“Would not cremation rob nature of its supply of ammonia?” ”

“ He always forces himself to write. When he is beginning, he struggles hard to overcome his repugnance, until he is interested in the work, when he composes with increasing pleasure and rapidity. On the average, he writes for from three to six hours daily, but never more than three hours at a time. When he sits down to the desk he has but a faint idea of the novel which he is about to write, being incapable of working out the details of a story in his mind, as some authors are able to do; but with the ink the thoughts begin to flow, and all difficulties are surmounted. ”

“ It makes no difference whether the grave we explore be that of a prime minister, upon which a magnificent monument rears its costly shaft high into the air, or that of a common criminal who tried to enjoy existence by spending three-quarters of his lifetime in prison; the result remains the same: in each we find the disgusting and sickening evidence of slow destruction,—a formless, putrid mass of flesh, and sometimes numberless revelling worms. ”

“ He imagines that he is more at liberty in this posture than when behind a writing desk. Ordinarily he writes with great ease, but sometimes the composition of a stirring chapter so mercilessly excites him that great beads of sweat appear upon his forehead, and he is compelled to lay down his pen, unable to write another line. He never writes unless he is in a suitable frame of mind, except it be on business matters. Sometimes, when laboring on topics of science, he works from ten to twelve hours at a stretch; he never spends more than three or four hours in succession on poetry. ”

“ The darkness and the dampness of the earth have been escaped, and so have the perils of grave-snatching, the indecencies of a possible dissecting-room, and the nameless horrors of putrefaction. You have pleasant memories to cherish of the ‘last sad hour,’ which, instead of ‘breathless darkness’ and the ‘narrow house’ and the dreadful thud of falling earth upon the coffin, presents to mind a lovely bed of rosy light, and a peaceful form clad in virgin purity resting within its soft embrace. ”

“ It is not for them he is seeking as he is roaming listlessly or walking rapidly through the trees. They have come to him from much observation, from the writings of others, from that which we call study, in which imagination has but little immediate concern. It is the fitting of the rules to the characters which he has created, the filling in with living touches and true colors those daubs and blotches on his canvas which have been easily scribbled with a rough hand, that the true work consists. ”

“ I rejoice at the thought that most writers on the momentous subject of incineration were medical men. Who, indeed, would be better qualified for such a task than the man who may daily witness the pernicious effect which the dead exercise over the living.
Those who are friends of the reform should come out openly in its favor. Crematists who are on the fence, or who, perhaps, hide back of it, might just as well keep out of the combat between cremation and interment altogether; we have no use for them. If you believe in cremation, candidly say so, and tell your friends why you believe in it. ”

“ I owe much of my success in life to the fact that I never allow work to interfere with the sacred time between breakfast and dinner. That is devoted to rest and thought. Much comfort can be realized during these hours by thinking what a stir you would make in the literary world if you could hire a man like Howells for five dollars a week to do your work for you. Such help, I find, is very difficult to obtain, and yet some people hold that the labor market is overcrowded. The great task of the forenoon should be preparation for the mid-day meal. ”

“ When the Romans and Greeks knew better than we know, we exercise no compunction in adopting their practices. Our boys are taught from the classics; artists study the models of Greek, that is, pagan, art; much of our philosophy is heathen, and more of our jurisprudence. The ancients were wiser than we in practicing incineration. Why not, then, imitate them in this respect? Granted even that cremation were a “pagan custom,” not to adopt it when it has been conclusively demonstrated to be superior to burial, simply because it is of heathenish origin, shows nothing but miserable narrow-mindedness. ”

“ He always sets out with a tolerably distinct outline in his mind—rarely on paper—of what he intends to write. But the filling in he leaves to the suggestions of thought in the hour of composition, and often gets on to currents which carry him into unexpected by-ways. He seldom begins a story that he would not like to make twice as long as his contract allows, so many incidents and combinations suggest themselves as he goes on. He never works under the influence of stimulants. Verse he never composes with a pen in his hand. ”

“ Does it agree with our ideas of right and wrong to endanger the lives of our great-grandchildren or their offspring by our methods of disposing of the dead? For, by the time they appear on the stage of this world, the burial-ground now sanitary will have become a breeding-place of disease from overuse.
When we remove burial-grounds to a distance, we only postpone the evil. We insure our own safety, it is true, by so doing; but we encumber the ground with most virulent seeds, and leave to future generations—to those who come after us—a terrible crop of pollution, disease germs, and death. ”

“ I am a great believer in the old adage of 'early to bed.' We are apt to slight the wisdom of our forefathers; but they knew what they were about when they advised early hours. I always get to bed early,—say two or three in the morning. I do not believe in night work. It is rarely of a good quality. The brain is wearied with the exertions of the day and should not be overtaxed. Besides, the time can be put in with less irksomeness at the theatre, or in company with a lot of congenial companions who avoid the stimulating effects of tea, coffee, and milk. ”

“ Often the site of an old grave is used to make a new one, and in consequence earth is brought to light that is saturated with the effluvia of corpses of those who, perhaps, have died of some contagious or infectious disease. The crime that is committed by individuals when they bury persons deceased of such maladies is pithily expressed by that champion of modern cremation, Sir Henry Thompson, who says: “Is it not indeed a social sin of no small magnitude to sow the seeds of disease and death broadcast, caring only to be certain that they cannot do much harm to our own generation?” ”

“ Care should be taken to avoid tea or coffee, and I think a word of warning ought to go forth against milk. The devastation that milk has wrought among literary men is fearful to contemplate. They begin, thinking that if they find it is hurting them, they can break off, but too often before they awaken to their danger the habit has mastered them. I avoid anything at breakfast except a large tumbler of brandy, with a little soda water added to give it warmth and strength.
[169] "No subject is of more importance to the literary aspirant than the dividing of the hours of work. ”

“ There is nothing repulsive in the idea of cremation. People’s prejudice is the only opponent it has. If they could be awakened to a sense of the horror of crowding thousands of bodies under the ground, to pollute in many instances the air we breathe and the water we drink, their prejudice would be overcome; cremation would be taken for what it truly is—a beautiful method of disposing of the body. The friends of the departed can do as they please with the remains. Take the ashes of a wife or daughter and put them in an urn ”

“ It has been said, and most naturally, what guarantee is there against poisoning if the remains are burned, and it is no longer possible, as after burial, to reproduce the body for the purpose of examination? It is to my mind a sufficient reply that, regarding only ‘the greatest good to the greatest number,’ the amount of evil in the shape of disease and death which results from the present system of burial in earth is infinitely larger than the evil caused by secret poisoning is or could be, even if the practice of the crime were very considerably to increase. ”

“ People who wonder at the change that has come over our New England villages, the homes of a vigorous ancestry, and deplore the advent of this mysterious ‘malaria,’ the unseen vampire that sucks the red blood of the present 104generation, would do well to look about them and see how the graveyards, old and new, have grown in two centuries, how the town has surrounded them; how the water supply is from the same old wells; how the town, never having arrived at a magnitude seeming to demand a sewerage system, allows the refuse of generations to mingle with the surface soil. ”