I had intended to allow the records that follow--the records of a
pilgrimage sorely beset and hampered by sorrow and distress--to speak
for themselves. Let me only say that one who makes public a record so
intimate and outspoken incurs, as a rule, a certain responsibility. He
has to consider in the first place, or at least he cannot help
instinctively considering, what the wishes of the writer would have
been on the subject. I do not mean that one who has to decide such a
point is bound to be entirely guided by that. He must weigh the
possible value of the record to other spirits against what he thinks
that the writer himself would have personally desired. A far more
important consideration is what living people who play a part in such
records feel about their publication. But I cannot help thinking that
our whole standard in such matters is a very false and conventional
one. Supposing, for instance, that a very sacred and intimate record,
say, two hundred years old, were to be found among some family papers,
it is inconceivable that any one would object to its publication on the
ground that the writer of it, or the people mentioned in it, would not
have wished it to see the light. We show how weak our faith really is
in the continuance of personal identity after death, by allowing the
lapse of time to affect the question at all; just as we should consider
it a horrible profanation to exhume and exhibit the body of a man who
had been buried a few years ago, while we approve of the action of
archaeologists who explore Egyptian sepulchres, subscribe to their
operations, and should consider a man a mere sentimentalist who
suggested that the mummies exhibited in museums ought to be sent back
for interment in their original tombs. We think vaguely that a man who
died a few years ago would in some way be outraged if his body were to
be publicly displayed, while we do not for an instant regard the
possible feelings of delicate and highly-born Egyptian ladies, on whose
seemly sepulture such anxious and tender care was expended so many
centuries ago.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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