{"id":8029,"date":"2022-04-24T12:19:37","date_gmt":"2022-04-24T16:19:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lecturia.org\/?p=8029"},"modified":"2022-04-24T12:19:40","modified_gmt":"2022-04-24T16:19:40","slug":"edgar-allan-poe-berenice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lecturia.org\/en\/short-stories\/edgar-allan-poe-berenice\/8029\/","title":{"rendered":"Edgar Allan Poe: Berenice"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitarem,
curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas.\u2014Ebn Zaiat

<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch,\u2014as 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?\u2014from 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<\/em> have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My baptismal name is Eg\u00e6us; 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\u2014in the character of the family mansion\u2014in the frescos of the chief saloon\u2014in the tapestries of the dormitories\u2014in the chiselling of some butresses in the armory\u2014but more especially in the gallery of antique paintings\u2014in the fashion of the library chamber\u2014and, lastly, in the very peculiar nature of the library\u2019s contents, there is more than sufficient evidence to warrant the belief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber, and with its volumes\u2014of 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\u2014that the soul has no previous existence. You deny it?\u2014let us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek not to convince. There is, however, a remembrance of a\u00ebrial forms\u2014of spiritual and meaning eyes\u2014of sounds, musical yet sad\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In that chamber was I born. Thus awaking from the long night of what seemed, but was not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy-land\u2014into a palace of imagination\u2014into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition\u2014it is not singular that I gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye\u2014that I loitered away my boyhood in books, and dissipated my youth in reverie; but it is<\/em> singular that as years rolled away, and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers\u2014it is<\/em> wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life\u2014wonderful how total an 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,\u2014not the material of my everyday existence\u2014but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*\u2003\u2003\u2003*\u2003\u2003\u2003*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my paternal halls. Yet differently we grew\u2014I ill of health and buried in gloom\u2014she agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy\u2014hers the ramble on the hill-side\u2014mine the studies of the cloister\u2014I living within my own heart, and addicted body and soul to the most intense and painful meditation\u2014she roaming carelessly through life with no thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours. Berenice!\u2014I call upon her name\u2014Berenice!\u2014and 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!\u2014Oh! Naiad among its fountains!\u2014and then\u2014then all is mystery and terror, and a tale which should not be told. Disease\u2014a fatal disease\u2014fell 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\u2014where was she? I knew her not\u2014or knew her no longer as Berenice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the numerous train of maladies superinduced by that fatal and primary one which effected 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<\/em> itself\u2014trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution, and from which her manner of recovery was, in most instances, startlingly abrupt. In the mean time my own disease\u2014for I have been told that I should call it by no other appellation\u2014my own disease, then, grew rapidly upon me, and assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form\u2014hourly and momently gaining vigor\u2014and 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<\/em>. It is more than probable that I 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device on the margin, or in the typography of a book; to become absorbed for the better part of a summer\u2019s day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the floor; 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 obstinately persevered in:\u2014such 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet let me not be misapprehended.\u2014The undue, 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<\/em> frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day dream often replete with luxury<\/em>, he finds the incitamentum<\/em> or first cause of his musings entirely vanished and forgotten. In my case the primary object was invariably frivolous<\/em>, 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 centre. The meditations were never<\/em> 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<\/em>, and are, with the day-dreamer, the speculative<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 the noble Italian C\u0153lius Secundus Curio \u201cde Amplitudine Beati Regni Dei<\/em>;\u201d St. Austin\u2019s great work, the \u201cCity of God;\u201d and Tertullian \u201cde Carne Christi<\/em>,\u201d in which the paradoxical sentence \u201cMortuus est Dei filius; credibile est quia ineptum est; et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est\u201d<\/em> occupied my undivided time, for many weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by trivial things, my reason bore resemblance to that ocean-crag spoken of by Ptolemy Hephestion, 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 Asphodel. And although, to a careless thinker, it might appear a matter beyond doubt, that the alteration produced by her unhappy malady, in the moral<\/em> 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, her calamity, indeed, gave me pain, and, taking deeply to heart that total wreck of her fair and gentle life, I did not fail 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 revelled in the less important but more startling changes wrought in the physical<\/em> frame of Berenice\u2014in the singular and most appalling distortion of her personal identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me, had never been<\/em> of the heart, and my passions always were<\/em> of the mind. Through the gray of the early morning\u2014among the trellissed shadows of the forest at noon-day\u2014and in the silence of my library at night, she had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen her\u2014not as the living and breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a dream\u2014not as a being of the earth, earthy, but as the abstraction of such a being\u2014not as a thing to admire, but to analyze\u2014not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation. And now<\/em>\u2014now 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 an evil moment, I spoke to her of marriage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And at length the period of our nuptials was approaching, when, upon an afternoon in the winter of the year,\u2014one of those unseasonably warm, calm, and misty days which are the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon,[1]<\/a>\u2014I 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Was it my own excited imagination\u2014or the misty influence of the atmosphere\u2014or the uncertain twilight of the chamber\u2014or the gray draperies which fell around her figure\u2014that caused in it so vacillating and indistinct an outline? I could not tell. She spoke no word, and I\u2014not for worlds 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 a vivid yellow, and jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning melancholy of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless, and seemingly pupil-less, and I shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare to the contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips. They parted; and in a smile of peculiar meaning, the teeth<\/em> 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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*\u2003\u2003\u2003*\u2003\u2003\u2003*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> of the teeth. Not a speck on their surface\u2014not a shade on their enamel\u2014not an indenture in their edges\u2014but what that brief period of her smile had sufficed to brand in upon my memory. I saw them now<\/em> even more unequivocally than I beheld them then<\/em>. The teeth!\u2014the teeth!\u2014they were here, and there, and every where, 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<\/em>, and I struggled in vain against its strange and irresistible influence. In the multiplied objects of the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth. For these I longed with a phrenzied desire. All other matters and all different interests became absorbed in their single contemplation. They\u2014they alone were present to the mental eye, and they, in their sole individuality, became the essence of my mental life. I held them in every light. I turned them in every attitude. I surveyed their characteristics. I dwelt upon their peculiarities. I pondered upon their conformation. 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\u2019selle Sall\u00e9 it has been well said, \u201cque tous ses pas etaient des sentiments,\u201d<\/em> and of Berenice I more seriously believed que tous ses dents etaient des id\u00e9es. Des id\u00e9es!<\/em>\u2014ah here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me! Des id\u00e9es!<\/em>\u2014ah therefore<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the evening closed in upon me thus\u2014and then the darkness came, and tarried, and went\u2014and the day again dawned\u2014and the mists of a second night were now gathering around\u2014and still I sat motionless in that solitary room, and still I sat buried in meditation, and still the phantasma<\/em> of the teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy as, with the most vivid and 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 Berenice was\u2014no 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*\u2003\u2003\u2003*\u2003\u2003\u2003*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014at least no definite comprehension. Yet its memory was replete with horror\u2014horror more horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful page in the record of my existence, written all over with dim, and hideous, and unintelligible recollections. I strived to decypher 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\u2014what was it? I asked myself the question aloud, and the whispering echoes of the chamber answered me, \u201cwhat was it?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em>, 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 Ebn Zaiat. \u201cDicebant mihi sodales si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas.\u201d<\/em> 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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?\u2014some broken sentences I heard. He told of a wild cry disturbing the silence of the night\u2014of the gathering together of the household\u2014of a search in the direction of the sound;\u2014and then his tones grew thrillingly distinct as he whispered me of a violated grave\u2014of a disfigured body enshrouded, yet still breathing, still palpitating, still alive!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

He pointed to my garments;\u2014they were muddy and clotted with gore. I spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand;\u2014it was indented with the impress of human nails. He directed my attention to some object against the wall;\u2014I looked at it for some minutes;\u2014it 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a> 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 Halcyon.\u2014Simonides<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Bibliographic data<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Title: Berenice<\/em>
Published in: Southern Literary Messenger<\/em> (March 1835)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Full text]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Edgar<\/figure><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitarem,curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas.\u2014Ebn Zaiat MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch,\u2014as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17262,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[586,900,572,570],"class_list":["post-8029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-short-stories","tag-edgar-allan-poe-en","tag-halloween-en","tag-horror-en","tag-united-states","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-33"],"acf":[],"taxonomy_info":{"category":[{"value":559,"label":"Short stories"}],"post_tag":[{"value":586,"label":"Edgar Allan Poe"},{"value":900,"label":"Halloween"},{"value":572,"label":"Horror"},{"value":570,"label":"United States"}]},"featured_image_src_large":["https:\/\/lecturia.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/Edgar-Allan-Poe-Berenice2.webp",1024,1024,false],"author_info":{"display_name":"Juan Pablo Guevara","author_link":"https:\/\/lecturia.org\/en\/author\/spartakku\/"},"comment_info":"","category_info":[{"term_id":559,"name":"Short stories","slug":"short-stories","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":559,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":424,"filter":"raw","cat_ID":559,"category_count":424,"category_description":"","cat_name":"Short stories","category_nicename":"short-stories","category_parent":0}],"tag_info":[{"term_id":586,"name":"Edgar Allan Poe","slug":"edgar-allan-poe-en","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":586,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":28,"filter":"raw"},{"term_id":900,"name":"Halloween","slug":"halloween-en","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":900,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":32,"filter":"raw"},{"term_id":572,"name":"Horror","slug":"horror-en","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":572,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":129,"filter":"raw"},{"term_id":570,"name":"United States","slug":"united-states","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":570,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":296,"filter":"raw"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lecturia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lecturia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lecturia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lecturia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lecturia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lecturia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lecturia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lecturia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lecturia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lecturia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}