{"code":"veil","subroute":"veil","title":"Beyond the Veil","collection_type":"theme","header_1":"Beyond the Veil","header_2":"Life, death and the transition between.","description":"A collection of short stories on death and what comes after. Read or download. The Premature Burial by Edgar Allan Poe. The Last Leaf by O. Henry.","has_text":true,"quote":{"quote":"“It will fall to-day, and I shall die at the same time.” * The Last Leaf","code":"the-last-leaf"},"image":true,"image_alt":"A sketch of pair of broken glasses and an ink stain","image_filter":"contrast(1.5)","image_title":"The Last Leaf - Sketch","image_code":"the-last-leaf","stories":[{"story":"a-story-without-an-end","description":"After mankind has almost entirely defeated disease, natural disasters, predation from the wild and hunger through medicine, shelter and agriculture we find ourselves victim to ourselves. Where suicide in many rural regions and past cultures was almost hard to even comprehend, in big cities it is almost commonplace. It is a tragic mystery that, as shown in this story, we might never understand.\nIn *A Story Without an End*, a man goes to his neighbour to find him bleeding out on the ground. They talk about the subject of suicide abstractly, avoiding the man’s personal reasons for his act."},{"story":"the-body-snatcher","description":"In the modern world where we have little respect for artefacts and ancient rituals, one of the few remaining sacred objects is the dead body. In the materialist perspective, once someone has passed on their body should hold no importance to us, and yet it would still insult nearly anyone to see a body placed into a plastic coffin or pulled out of a grave. \n*The Body Snatcher* investigates the immoral act of grave digging, and of desecrating a dead body for selfish profiteering. The theoretically victimless crime is nonetheless evidently a grave sin to most people, and one that brings the characters of this story their appropriate retribution."},{"story":"the-premature-burial","description":"We have always feared death to varying degrees. We have feared the end of all our ambitions, of leaving behind our loved ones and of that mysterious and threatening place that we go to, whether that is somewhere beyond the Earthly world, or simply six feet under and surrounded by soil.\nEdgar Allen Poe was notoriously obsessed with the fear of being buried alive: Taphophobia. He wrote several stories with this as a theme, the Magnus Opus being *The Premature Burial*."},{"story":"the-poets-of-the-tomb","description":"‘If thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee,’ says Nietzsche. And many writers who spend too much time gazing into the abyss start bringing it into the world through their art. \nIn *The Poets of the Tomb*, Lawson rages against such authors who desire to ‘vanish from the scene’, preferring himself to tell others of the work they have to do on Earth while they are there, of living, fighting and doing good. Leave the dead to concern themselves with death, he believes, and the living to concern themselves with life."},{"story":"the-last-leaf","description":"There is little chance to avoid thinking about the end when it is near, and if you don’t find yourself on a battlefield then the place you are most likely to feel nearest is sick in bed. There are plenty of reasons to panic when ill, but strangely, most people become very quiet and even peaceful. \n*The Last Leaf* follows a woman who predicts that she will go when the last leaf outside her window falls. Her friend is confused by her lack of will to recover and does what she can to motivate her dying friend."},{"story":"a-childs-dream-of-a-star","description":"A children’s fable teaches a perspective even a child can understand, but is this perspective simply one we must grow out of, or does it hold a truth that we suffer to forget.\nThe legendary Dickens writes of a boy who loses his sister at a young age, and must wait his whole life to reunite with her on the other side of the veil."}]}