When
I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to
think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive
images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bonds
of reverie. I saw--with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,--I saw the
pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.
I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working
of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half
vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the
effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator
of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away
from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to
itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade;
that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside
into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of
the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous
corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he
is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside,
opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative
eyes.
I opened mine in terror.
The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and
I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around.
I see them still; the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters,
with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy
lake and white high Alps were beyond. I could not so easily get rid of
my hideous phantasm; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something
else. I recurred to my ghost story,--my tiresome unlucky ghost story! O!
if I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself
had been frightened that night!
Swift as light and
as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. "I have found it! What
terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre
which had haunted my midnight pillow." On the morrow I announced that I
had thought of a story. I began that day with the words, It was on a dreary
night of November, making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking
dream.
Taken from Mary Shelley's
introduction of Frankenstein.
http://www.susqu.edu/ac_depts/arts_sci/english/knorrfr/intro.htm
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