There are times when my research gives me great cause for concern

Let's say that you're a hermit who just happens to exist in the pages of Richard Cobbold's Freston Tower: A Tale of the  Times of Cardinal Wolsey.  Now, you've spent years prophesying that a certain palace will be collapsing soon.  And tonight...the time has come! You can actually see signs that the palace is starting to collapse, right now, at this very moment! But wait--there are lots of people in the palace, including the classicist William Latimer.  Which of the following options do you choose?

1) Race into the palace, shouting "Hey, dudes! You're all gonna die if you don't hotfoot it out of here!"*
2) Enter the palace, pause, and deliver a poem of over eighty lines (in rhyming couplets, no less), in which you take the time to reprove some of the other characters for excessive  pride (besides also suggesting that remaining inside appears to be contraindicated).  Then you die, at which point the palace (which, up until this moment, has graciously refrained from collapsing) decides that now would be a good time to fall in.  Slowly enough for everyone to escape, of course.  Except for you, since you're dead.

If you're the hermit in Freston Tower, then, yes, you choose option #2.  Looking on the bright side, however, your death means that you don't have to contemplate such phrasing as "a motley group of terrified faces stood looking upon the troubled waters" (112)--apparently, the shock of the collapse was so great that everyone's chins dropped down to their feet (because if the faces "stood," then clearly they still had feet to stand on, even if they had no bodies.  Right? Right...).   Moreover, you are also saved from the prospect of super-emo Thomas Wolsey, who enters the priesthood because (wait for it!) Latimer has stolen his sweetheart. 

*--Or the fifteenth-century equivalent.