Alive in Death Valley

"We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss - we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness, and dizziness, and horror, become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape. . . . It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. . . . And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore, do we the more impetuously approach it. . . . Examine these and similar actions as we will, we shall find them resulting solely from the spirit of the Perverse."

Edgar Allan Poe, from The Imp of the Perverse