Time Swings On...

Having read "The Pit and the Pendulum" before in high school it was nice to read it again and see how differently I read it now. From beginning to end of the story time seems to drag. It keeps the readers on the edges of their chair. Poe takes a good bit to describe the swooning of the character and the judgement. Then, suddenly the character is awake and in the cell with the pendulum swinging closer. I thought that the idea of the pendulum was really cool. As a clock pendulum swings marking off the seconds and taking each person closer still to his impending demise, so the pendulum, with it's seemingly unavoidable sentence, swings ever closer. It is intriguing how fascinated by death people are when they look it straight in the face. Some, like this character, take an uncanny pleasure in watching it loom ever closer and closer. This story definitely makes one stop and think about how time is ever moving and we don't know how much longer each of us has. On a side note, I remember being very relieved and glad that the story ends happily with the character escaping.