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Berenice By Edgar Allan Poe
PAGE: 1
BERENICE
Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas
aliquantulum forelevatas.
- _Ebn 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 - 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 Egaeus; 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 frescos of the chief saloon - in the
tapestries of the dormitories - in the chiselling 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 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 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 - into a palace of imagination - into the wild dominions
of monastic thought and erudition - 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 fathers - it _is_ wonderful what
stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life - wonderful 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, not the material of my every-day existence, but in very deed
that existence utterly and solely in itself.
* * * * * * *
Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my
paternal halls. Yet differently we grew - I, ill of health, and
buried in gloom - she, agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy;
hers, the ramble on the hill-side - 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 name -
Berenice! - 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, Naiad 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 simoon 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 is she? I knew her
not - or knew her no longer as Berenice.
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_ itself - trance 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 - 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 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_ 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 typography 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 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: 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 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_
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_, he finds the
_incitamentum_, 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 centre. 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 are, 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 the noble Italian, Coelius Secundus Curio, "_De
Amplitudine Beati Regni Dei;_" St. Austin's great work, the "City of
God;" and Tertullian's "_De Carne Christi_," in which the paradoxical
sentence "_Mortuus est Dei filius; credible est quia ineptum est: et
sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est,_" occupied my
undivided time, for many weeks of laborious and fruitless
investigation.
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_ 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 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 revelled 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.
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