Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe – A Haunting Tale of Obsession and Madness

0:01 One of my favorite memories of scaring myself as a child was getting a compilation book of Edgar Allan Poe's stories from my elementary school library. It brought me so much fear and so much excitement. I remember running home from school with that book in my backpack as the sky was dark and a storm was coming. I was in my childhood living room, but I wasn't alone. I had a pizza and the books of Poe. Every so often I'll bring you a tale of Poe, and I hope it gives you that scary fun sense, just the same as it does for me. When the clock strikes midnight, the story will begin. Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe. Dis

1:48 bond me. He's so Dallas si spectaculum amikai visitarum curras MIAs aluquantulum for eh levatas aben zaiat. Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of Earth is multiform, overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow. Its hues are various as the hues of that arch, as distinct too, yet as intimately blended, overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow. How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness, from the covenant of peace, a simile of sorrow. But as in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so in fact out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been My baptismal name is Eegeus.

3:14 That of my family I will not mention. Yet there are no towers in the land more time honored than my gloomy, gray hereditary halls. Our line has been called a race of visionaries, and in many striking particulars in the character of the family mansion, in the frescoes of the chief saloon, in the tapestries of the dormitories, in the chiseling of some buttresses in the armory, but more especially in the gallery of antique paintings, in the fashion of the library chamber, and lastly, in the very peculiar nature of the library's contents. There is more than sufficient evidence to warrant the belief the recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber and with its volumes, of which latter I will say no more here died my mother. Herein was I born. But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before, that the soul has no previous existence. You deny it. Let

4:44 us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek not to convince. There is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms, of spiritual and meaning, eyes, of sounds musical yet sad, A remembrance which will not be excluded, a memory like a shadow, vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady, and like a shadow too in the impossibility of my getting rid of it, while the sunlight of my reason shall exist in that chamber.

5:25 Was I born? Thus, awaking from the long night of what seemed but was not nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairyland, into a palace of imagination, into the wild dominions of monastic thought and iradation. It is not singular that I gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye, that I loitered away my boyhood in books and dissipated my youth in reverie. But it is singular that, as years rolled away and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my father's.

6:13 It is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life. Wonderful how total and inversion took place in the character of my commonest thought. The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became in turn not the material of my every day existence, but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself. Bearonice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my paternal halls. Y differently we grew I ill of health and buried in gloom. She agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy. Hers the ramble on the hillside, mine the studies of the cloister. I living within my own heart, and addicted body and soul to the most intense and painful meditation. She roaming carelessly through life, with no thought of the shadows in her path or the silent flight of the raven winged hours. Berenice. I call upon her, Berenice,

7:50 and from the gray ruins of memory, a thousand tumultuous recollections are startled at the sound ah. Vividly is her image before me, now as in the early days of her light heartedness and joy, Oh gorgeous yet fantastic beauty, oh sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim, oh n did among its fountains. And then then all is mystery and terror, and a tale which should not be told. Disease, a fatal disease, fell like the simoom upon her frame. And even while I gazed upon her, the spirit of change swept over her, pervading her mind, her habits, and her character, and in a manner the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the identity of her person Alas the destroyer came and went, and the victim where was she? I knew her not, or knew her no longer as Berenice. Among

9:22 the numerous train of maladies superinduced by that fatal and primary one which affected a revolution of so horrible a kind in the moral and physical being of my cousin, may be mentioned as the most distressing and obstinate in its nature, a species of epilepsy, not unfrequently terminating in trance itself, trance very nearly resembling positive disillusion, and from which her manner of recovery was in mo most instances startlingly abrupt in the meantime my own disease, for I have been told that I should call it by no other appellation. My own disease then grew rapidly upon me and assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form, hourly and momently gaining vigor, and at length obtaining over me the most incomprehensible ascendancy. This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive. It is more than just probable that I

10:56 am not understood, but I fear indeed that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case the powers of meditation, not to speak, technically busied and buried themselves in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe, to muse for long, unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device on the margin or in the topography of a book, to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day in a quaint shadow, falling aslant upon the tapestry or upon the door, To lose myself for an entire night, in watching the steady flame of a lamp or the embers of a fire, To dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower, To repeat monotonously some common word until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind. To lose all sense of motion or physical existence by means of absolute bodily quiescence, long and

12:30 obstinately persevered in Such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not indeed altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to anything like analysis or explanation. Yet, let me not be misapprehended. The un do earnest and morbid attention thus excited by objects in their own nature frivolous, must not be confounded in character with that ruminating propensity common to all mankind, and more especially indulged in by persons of ardent imagination. It was not even as might be at first supposed an extreme condition or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and essentially distinct and different. In the one instance, the dreamer or enthusiast, being interested by an object, usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions, issuing therefrom until at the conclusion of a day dream, all replete with luxury, he

14:02 finds the incedimentum, or first cause of his musings entirely vanished and forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance, few deductions, if any, were made, and those few pertinaciously returning in upon the original object as a center. The meditations were never pleasurable, and at the termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In a word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised, were with me, as I have said before, the attentive and r with the day dreamer, the speculative. My books at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to irritate the disorder partook, it will be perceived largely in their imaginative and inconsequential nature of the characteristic qualities of the disorder itself. I well remember, among others, the treatise of

15:38 the noble Italian Colius Secundus Curio de amplitudine b te Regi d. Saint Austin's great work The City of God, the Tertullian de Carne Criste, in which the paradoxical sentence more to U S. S. D. Philus kredible estkia ineptum est et sypultus resurrects it sertem eskia impossibility est occupied my undivided time for many weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation.

16:25 Thus it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by trivial things, my reason bore resemblance to that ocean crag spoken by Teloami hefeshin which, steadily resisting the attacks of human violence and the fiercer fury of the waters and the winds, trembled only to the touch of the flower called asvadl, and although to a careless thinker, it might appear a matter beyond doubt that the altar toration produced by her unhappy malady in the moral condition of Berenice would afford me many objects for the exercise of that intense and abnormal meditation whose nature I have been at some trouble in explaining. Yet such was not in any degree the case. In the lucid intervals of my infirmity.

17:26 Her calamity indeed gave me pain, and taking deeply to heart that total wreck of her fair and gentle life, I did not fall to ponder frequently and bitterly upon the wonder working means by which so strange a revolution had been so suddenly brought to pass. But these reflections partook not of the idiosyncrasy of my disease, and were such as would have occurred under similar circumstances to the ordinary mass of mankind, true to its own character. My disorder reveled in the less important, but more startling changes wrought in the physical frame of Berenice, in the singular and most appalling distortion of her personal identity during the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty. Most surely I had never loved her in the strange anomaly of my existence.

18:39 Feelings with me had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind. Through the gray of the early morning, among the trellised shadows of the forest at noonday, and in the silence of my library at night, she had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen her not as the living and breathing Berenice, but as the baronice of a dream. Not as a being of the earth earthy, but not as the abstraction of such a being. Not as a thing to admire but to analyze, not as an object of love, but as the theme of the more abstruse although desultory speculation.

19:39 And now now I shuddered in her presence, and grew pale at her approach. Yet bitterly lamenting her fallen and desolate condition, I called to mind that she had loved me long, and in in an evil moment, I spoke to her of marriage, and at length the period of our nuptials was approaching. When upon an afternoon in the winter of the year, one of those unseasonably warm, calm and misty days which are the nurse of the beautiful halcyon one, I sat and sat as I thought, alone in the inner apartment of the library, But uplifting my eyes, I saw that Berenice stood before me. Was it my own excited imagination or the misty influence of the atmosphere, or the uncertain twilight of the chamber, or the gray draperies which fell around her figure that caused in it so vacillating and indistinct an outline I could not tell.

21:10 She spoke no word, I not for words could I have uttered a syllable. An icy chill ran through my frame, A sense of insufferable anxiety oppressed me, A consuming curiosity pervaded my soul, and, sinking back upon the chair, I remained for some time, breathless and motionless, with my eyes riveted upon her person alas its emaciation was excessive, and not one vestige of the former being lurked in any single line of the contour. My burning glances at length fell upon the face. The forehead was high and very pale and singularly placid, and the once jetty hair fell partially over it and overshadowed. The hollow temples with innumerable ringlets now of vivid yellow and jarring discordantly in their fantastic character with the raining melancholy of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless and lustreless, and seemingly pupilless, and I

22:46 shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare to the contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips. They parted it, and in a smile of peculiar meath, the teeth of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view. Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that having done so, I had died, For as Jove during the winter season gives twice seven days of warmth, men have called this clement and temperate time the nurse of the beautiful Halcion Simonides.

23:35 The shutting of a door disturbed me, and looking up, I found that my cousin had departed from the chamber, but from the disordered chamber of my brain had not alas departed, and would not be driven away the white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth, not a speck on their surface, not a shade on their enamel, not an indenture in their edges. But what that period of her smile had sufficed to brand in upon my memory? I saw them now even more unequivocally than I beheld them.

24:22 Then the teeth, the teeth, they were here and there and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me, long, narrow and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first terrible development. Then came the full fury of my monomania, and I struggled in vain against its strange and irresistible influence in the multiplied objects of the external world world, I had no thoughts but for the teeth. For these I longed with a frenzied desire. All other matters and all different interests became absorbed in their single contemplation. They, they alone, were present to the mental eye, and they, in their soul individuality, became the essence of my mental life. I held them in every light, I turned them in every attitude.

25:32 I surveyed their characteristics. I dwelt upon their peculiarities. I pondered upon their confirmation. I mused upon the alteration in their nature. I shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive and sentient power, and, even when unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral expression of mad Sali salis. It had been well said Ktu sa pa etuiene des sentiments, and of Berenice I more seriously believed Caetus say tense etteninte de idis de IDs ah. Here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me death idees ah.

26:28 Therefore it was that I coveted them so madly. I felt that their possession could alone ever restore me to peace, in giving me back to reason. And the evening closed in upon me. Thus, and then the darkness came and tarried and went, and the day again dawned, and the mists of a second night were now gathering around. And still I sat motionless in that solitary room, and still I sat buried in meditation, And still the phantasma of the teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy, as with the most vivid, hideous distinctness. It floated about amid the changing lights and shadows of the chamber. At length there broke in upon my dreams a cry as of horror and dismay. And thereunto, after a pause, succeeded the sound of troubled voices, intermingled with many low moanings of sorrow or of pain. I arose from my seat, and, throwing open one of the doors of the library, saw standing out in the antechamber a servant maiden, all in tears, who told me that

27:59 Berenice was no more. She had been seized with epilepsy in the early morning, and now at the closing in of the night, the grave was ready for its tenant, and all the preparations for the burial were completed. I found myself sitting in the library, and again, sitting there alone, it seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream. I knew that it was now midnight, and I was well aware that since the setting of the sun Berenice had been interred. But of that dreary period which intervened, I had no positive, at least no definitive comprehension. Its memory was replete with horror, horror more horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity.

29:13 It was a fearful page in the record, my existence, written all over with dim and hideous and unintelligible recollections. I strived to decipher them, but in vain while ever and anon like the spirit of a departed sound the shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice seemed to be ringing in my ears. I had done a deed. What was it? I asked myself the question aloud, and the whispering echoes of the chamber answered me, what was it?

30:02 On the table beside me burned a lamp, and near it lay a little box. It was of no remarkable character, and I had seen it frequently before, for it was the property of the family physician. But how came it there upon my table? And why did I shudder in regarding it? These things were in no manner to be accounted for. And my eyes at length dropped to the open pages of a book and to a sentence. Underscored therein the words were the singular but simple ones of the poet eben zayat di sebont mihi sodales si sepulchurum I machai visitarum curras MIAs ali quantulum fori levatas. Why then, as I perused them, did the hairs of my head erect themselves on end, and the blood of my body become congealed within my veins. There came a light tap at the library door, and pale as the tenant of a tomb a menial entered upon tiptoe. His looks were wild with terror, and he spoke to me in a voice tremulous, husky, and very low. What said he? Some

31:38 broken sentences I heard. He told of a wild cry, disturbing the silence of the night, of the gathering together of the household, of a search in the direction of the sound. And then his tones grew thrillingly distinct, as he whispered to me of a violated grave, of a disfigured body, and shrouded, yet still breathing, still palpitating, still alive. He pointed to garments. They were muddy and clotted with gore. I spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand.

32:22 It was indented with the impress of human nails. He directed my attention to some object against the wall. I looked at it for some minutes. It was a spade with a shriek. I bounded to the table and grasped the box that lay upon it, but I could not force it open, and in my tremor, it slipped from my hands and fell heavily and burst into pieces. And from it with a rattling sound. There rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty two small, white and ivory looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor