Idle Things

There is a story in one of Hebel’s almanacs about a man lost in a mine collapse. The man went to work in the bloom of his youth—and fifty years later, when a group of miners come upon his body in the pit, they find him much the same. His body, soaked in ferrous sulfate, is so miraculously preserved that the man still looks “as if he had died only an hour before,” as if he were only sleeping. In the meantime, Lisbon drowned, Poland disappeared, the Ottomans advanced, and the long waltz of revolution and reaction continued apace. The sleeper remains, yet the world of his youth has come and gone, with his unblemished body the only remnant. Even the woman to whom he was once betrothed has grown old. Still in the bloom of youth, he must return to the earth.