I’m pretty positive that Edgar Allan Poe had (has?
) the power to travel through
time. Hear me out on this one.
It’s not just the well-known circumstances of his life—orphaned at birth, father of
the mystery novel, master of cryptology, maestro of the macabre. Nor am I referring
to the head-scratching details of his death, how he was found in a gutter wearing
someone else’s clothes, babbling incoherently about an unidentified man named
“Reynolds.” And I won’t even get into the confounding reports of a nameless figure
who, for seven decades, would show up to Poe’s gravesite on the early hours of his
birthday, dressed in black with a glass of cognac and three roses.
Curious and tragic, yes, but hardly evidence that the acclaimed horror writer could
transcend the limits of space and time. No, my time travel theory concerns the
author’s creative output, which you’ll soon see, is so flukishly prophetic as to
make my outlandish claim seem plausible—nay, probable!
The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is a loosely linked map of flesh-
eating floaters, crunched skull-survivors, and primordial particles. OK, here we
go…
Exhibit A: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
Written in 1837, Poe’s only completed novel details a mutiny on a whaling ship lost
at sea. Out of supplies, the men revert to cannibalism, drawing straws to elect a
sacrifice. A boy named Richard Parker draws the shortest straw and is subsequently
eaten.
Now here’s where it gets weird(er): In 1884, forty-six years later after the
novel’s publication, four men would be set adrift following the sinking of their
yacht. Shipwrecked and without food, they too would go the survival cannibalism
route, electing to kill and eat a 17-year-old cabin boy. The boy’s name: Richard
Parker.
The extraordinary parallel went unnoticed for nearly a century, until a widely-
circulated letter from a descendant of the real Parker outlined the similarities
between the novel’s scene and the actual event. The letter was selected for
publication in The Sunday Times after the journalist Arthur Koestler put out a call
for tales of “striking coincidence.” Striking indeed…
Exhibit B: “The Businessman”
In 1848, a railroad worker named Phineas Gage suffered a traumatic brain injury
after taking an iron spike through the skull. Somehow he survived, though his
personality would change drastically. These behavioral changes were closely
studied, allowing the medical community to develop the first understanding of the
role played by the frontal lobe on social cognition.
Except for Poe, who’d inexplicably understood the profound personality changes
caused by frontal lobe syndrome for nearly a decade. In 1840, he penned a
characteristically gruesome story called “The Businessman” about an unnamed
narrator who suffers a traumatic head injury as a young boy, leading to a life of
obsessive regularity and violent, sociopathic outbursts.
Poe’s grasp of frontal lobe syndrome is so precise that neurologist Eric Altshuler
writes, “There’s a dozen symptoms and he knows every single one…There’s everything
in that story, we’ve hardly learned anything more.” Altshuler, who, to reiterate,
is a medically-licensed neurologist and not at all a crackpot, goes on to say,
“It’s so exact that it’s just weird, it’s like he had a time machine.”
Exhibit C: Eureka
Still unconvinced? What if I told you that Poe predicted the origins of the
universe eighty years before modern science would begin to formulate the Big Bang
theory? Surely, an amateur stargazer with no formal training in cosmology could not
accurately describe the machinery of the universe, rejecting widely-held
inaccuracies while solving a theoretical paradox that had bewildered astronomers
since Kepler. Except that’s exactly what he happened.
The prophetic vision came in the form of Eureka, a 150-page prose poem critically
panned for its complexity and regarded by many as the work of a madman. Written in
the final year of the author’s life, Eureka describes an expanding universe that
began in “one instantaneous flash” derived from a single “primordial particle.”
Poe goes on to put forth the first legitimate solution Olber’s paradox—the question
of why, given the vast number of stars in the universe, the night sky is dark—by
explaining that light from the expanding universe had not yet reached our solar
system. When Edward Robert Harrison published Darkness at Night in 1987, he
credited Eureka as having anticipated his findings.
In an interview with Nautilus, Italian astronomer Alberto Cappi speaks of Poe’s
prescience, admitting, “It’s surprising that Poe arrived at his dynamically
evolving universe, because there was no observational or theoretical evidence
suggesting such a possibility. No astronomer in Poe’s day could imagine a non-
static universe.”
But what if Poe wasn’t of a day at all, but of of all the days? What if his written
prophecies—on the cannibalistic demise of Richard Parker, the symptoms of frontal
lobe syndrome, and the Big Bang—were merely reportage from his journey through the
extratemporal continuum?
Surely I sound like a tin-foil capped loon, but maybe, maybe, there are many more
prophecies scattered throughout the author’s work, a possibility made all the more
likely by the fact that, as The New York Times notes, “Poe was so undervalued for
so long, there is not a lot of Poe-related material around.”
I’ll leave you with this quote, taken from a letter that Poe wrote to James Russell
Lowell in 1844, in which he apologizes for his absence and slothfulness:
I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human
perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon
humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was
6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to
suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the
rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon
equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to
lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass…You speak of “an estimate of my
life” — and, from what I have already said, you will see that I have none to give.
I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability and evanescence of temporal
things, to give any continuous effort to anything — to be consistent in anything.
My life has been whim — impulse — passion — a longing for solitude — a scorn of all
things present, in an earnest desire for the future.
