menu_book Chapter 8

the epigraph reads de cheevent mihi sodales si sepulcum amicaeo visitarum curas meis aliquantulum for elevatis ebn zayat in english this is my companions told me i might find some alleviation of my misery in visiting the grave of my beloved 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 of which are have their origin and ecstasies which might have been my baptismal name is a geus that of my family i will not mention yet there are no towers in the land more time-honoured than my gloomy grey 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 chiselling of some buttresses in the armoury

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 convince myself i seek not to convince there is however a remembrance of aerial forms of spiritual and meaning eyes of sounds musical yet sad 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 fairyland 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 in the springs of my life

wonderful how total 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 to ramble on the hillside mind 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 grey 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 o gorgeous yet fantastic beauty o silver amid the shrubberies of arnheim o nighed among its foundations and then then always mystery and terror and a tale which should not be told disease a fatal disease felt like the sun moon 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 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 vigour and at length obtaining over me the most incomprehensible ascendency 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 a 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-caughts of his musings entirely vanished and forgotten in my case the primary object was invariably frivolous although assuming to 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 a 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 would 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 beitia regni dei st austin's great work the city of god and tertullian's de cardine christi in which the paradoxical sentence mortuus est de filius criibule esquia ineptum est et suppaltus verserexit certum esquia 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 hephaestion 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 that matter beyond doubt that the alteration produced by her unhappy malady in the moral condition of berenice would afford me many objects of the exercise of that intense and abnormal meditation whose nature i had been at some trouble in explaining yet such was not in any degree the case in 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 as 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 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 of the heart my passion always were of the mind

through the grey of the early morning among the trellis 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 a living and breathing berenice but as a berenice of a dream not as a being of the earth earthy but as the abstraction of such a being not as a thing to admire but to analyse not as an object of love but as a theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation and now-now i started 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 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 had the nurse of the beautiful halcyon 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 grey draperies which fell around her figure that caused in it so vacillating and indistinct an outline i could not tell she spoke no word and i not for worlds could i have uttered a syllable an icy chill run 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 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 pupilless 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 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 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 or what that period of her smile had sufficed to bring it upon my memory i saw them now even more unequivocally than i beheld them then the teeth oh 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 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 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 confirmation i mused upon the alteration in their nature i shuddered as i assigned to them imagination a sensitive and sentient power and even when unassisted by the lips a capability of moral expression of mademoiselle salle it has been well said que tout se paient un tain de sentiments and of berenice i more seriously believed que tout se dain et tain de a-day de a-day de a-day ah here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me de a-day ah therefore it was that i coveted them so madly i felt that their possession could ever alone restore me to peace and 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 that 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 they broke in upon my dreams a cry 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 ante-chamber a serpent maiden all in tears who told me that berenice was-no more she had been seized with epilepsy in the early morning and now at the closing end 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 definite comprehension yet its memory was replete with horror horror 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 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 on the table beside me burned a lamp and near it lay a little box it was with 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 ebn zayat the tuban mihi sodalis his sepultum amicaea visitatum quid as meis aliquantulum for elevatis 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 and 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 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 his tones grew thrillingly distinct as he whispered me of a violet grave of a disfigured body enshrouded 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 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 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 they rolled up some instruments of dental surgery intermingled with thirty-two small white and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor end of berenice recorded by blake kohan wordsmith ninety four my blog is theotherblake.wordpress.com