[adapted]

by
Edgar Allan Poe

My friends told me, if I visited my friend’s grave, my worries would be a little less. — Ebn Zaiat.

Misery has many forms. The suffering of the world has many forms. Reaching over the wide horizon like the rainbow, its colors are as many as the colors of that arch — as separate too, yet as closely mixed. Reaching over the wide horizon like the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have found a kind of ugliness? — from the promise of peace, an image of sorrow? But as, in morals, evil is a result of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past happiness is the pain of to-day, or the pains that are now, come from the great joys that might have been.

My first name is Egaeus; my family name I will not say. Yet there are no towers in the land older than my dark, gray, family halls. Our family has been called a family of dreamers; and in many clear details — in the style of the family mansion — in the paintings on the walls of the main room — in the wall hangings of the bedrooms — in the carving of some supports in the weapons room — but more especially in the gallery of old paintings — in the design of the library room — and, lastly, in the very unusual nature of the library’s contents — there is more than enough proof for this belief.

The memories of my earliest years are linked to that room, and to its books — about which I will say no more. Here died my mother. Here I was born. But it is useless to say that I had not lived before — that the soul has no earlier life. Do you deny it? — let us not argue about it. I am convinced myself; I do not try to convince you. There is, however, a memory of shapes in the air — of spiritual and meaningful eyes — of sounds, musical yet sad — a memory that will not go away; a memory like a shadow — unclear, changing, not clear, not steady; and like a shadow, too, because I cannot get rid of it while the light of my reason exists.

I was born in that room. So, waking from the long night of what seemed, but was not, nothing, at once into the very land of fairy tale — into a palace of imagination — into the wild lands of monk-like thought and learning — it is not strange that I looked around me with a surprised and eager eye — that I spent my boyhood in books, and spent my youth in daydreams; but it is strange that, as years went by, and the middle of my adult life found me still in the house of my family — it is strange how much stillness fell on the springs of my life — strange how complete a change took place in the nature of my most common thought. The real things of the world felt to me like dreams, and like dreams only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, not the stuff of my everyday life, but truly that life itself, completely and only.

Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my father’s house. Yet we grew in different ways — I, often sick, and lost in sadness — she, quick, graceful, and full of energy; hers, the walk on the hillside — mine the studies in a quiet, closed place; I, living inside my own heart, and given, body and soul, to the deepest and most painful thinking — she, wandering carelessly through life, with no thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the dark hours.

Berenice! — I call her name — Berenice! — and from the old ruins of memory a thousand wild memories jump at the sound! Ah, her image is clear before me now, as in the early days of her happiness and joy! Oh, beautiful yet strange beauty! Oh, spirit among the bushes of Arnheim! Oh, water spirit among its fountains! And then — then all is mystery and fear, and a tale which should not be told. Disease — a deadly disease, fell like a hot desert wind upon her body; and, even while I looked at her, the spirit of change swept over her, filling her mind, her habits, and her character, and, in a way most hidden and terrible, changing even who she was! Alas! the destroyer came and went! — and the victim — where is she? I did not know her — or knew her no longer as Berenice.

Among the many illnesses caused by that deadly and first one which made a change so terrible in the mind and body of my cousin, may be named as the most painful and stubborn in its nature, a kind of epilepsy often ending in trance itself — trance very nearly like real death, and from which her way of recovery was in most cases, shockingly sudden. In the meantime my own illness — for I have been told that I should call it by no other name — my own illness, then, grew quickly upon me, and finally took on a one-idea madness of a new and very strange form — gaining strength every hour and every moment — and at last gaining over me the most hard to understand power.

This one fixed idea, if I must call it so, was an unhealthy, too strong nervousness in that part of the mind which is called attention. It is very likely that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is not at all possible to give to the mind of the ordinary reader a clear idea of that nervous strength of interest with which, in my case, the powers of deep thinking (not to speak in hard words) kept busy and buried themselves, in the quiet looking at even the most ordinary things in the world.

To think for long hours without getting tired, with my attention fixed on some small, unimportant design on the edge, or in the letters of a book; to become lost, for most of a summer’s day, in an odd shadow falling at an angle upon the hanging cloth or upon the floor; to lose myself, for a whole night, in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the coals of a fire; to dream away whole days over the smell of a flower; to repeat, over and over, some common word, until the sound, because of saying it many times, stopped giving any idea at all to the mind; to lose all sense of movement or physical existence, by not moving at all, kept up for a long time without stopping: such were a few of the most common and least harmful strange habits caused by a state of the mind, not, indeed, completely unheard of, but certainly hard for any kind of study or explanation.

Yet let me not be misunderstood. The excessive, serious, and unhealthy attention thus caused by things that are, by their own nature, unimportant, must not be mistaken for that habit of thinking for a long time common to all people, and more especially used by people of strong imagination. It was not even, as might be first thought, an extreme state, or an overdoing of such a habit, but mainly and basically separate and different. In one case, the dreamer, or eager person, being interested by a thing usually not unimportant, without noticing loses sight of this thing in a large mass of ideas and guesses coming from it, until, at the end of a day-dream often full of pleasure, he finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his thoughts, completely gone and forgotten.

In my case, the main object was always unimportant, although seeming, through my sick eyes, to have a changed and not real importance. Few answers, if any, were found; and those few kept returning to the original object as a centre. The thoughts were never pleasant; and, at the end of the daydream, the first reason, instead of being out of sight, had reached that strangely too great interest which was the main sign of the illness. In short, the powers of mind used most were, with me, as I have said before, attention, and are, with the day-dreamer, guessing.

My books, at this time, if they did not actually make the illness worse, shared, as you will see, to a large extent, the main qualities of the illness itself, in their imaginative and without clear purpose nature. I clearly remember, among others, the book by 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 strange sentence “Mortuus est Dei filius; credible est quia ineptum est: et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est,” took all my time, for many weeks of hard and useless study.

So it will seem that, upset only by small things, my mind was like that ocean rock spoken of by Ptolemy Hephestion, which, always fighting the attacks by human hands, and the stronger force of the waters and the winds, shook only at the touch of the flower called Asphodel. And even though, to a careless thinker, it might seem sure, that the change made by her sad illness, in the character of Berenice, would give me many things to use for that intense and strange thinking whose nature I have taken some trouble to explain, yet this was not in any way the case.

In the clear moments of my illness, her misfortune, indeed, gave me pain, and, feeling deeply the total ruin of her fair and gentle life, I did not fail to think, often and bitterly, about the amazing ways by which so strange a change had been so suddenly brought about. But these thoughts did not have the odd nature of my illness, and were such as would have come, under similar circumstances, to most people. True to its own nature, my illness focused on the less important but more shocking changes made in the body of Berenice — on the strange and most terrible distortion of who she was.

During the brightest days of her perfect beauty, I surely had never loved her. In the strange oddness of my life, my feelings had never been of the heart, and my passions were always of the mind. Through the gray of the early morning — among the thick shadows of the forest at noon — and in the silence of my library at night — she had passed quickly before my eyes, and I had seen her — not as the living and breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a dream; not as a person of the real world, but as the idea of such a person; not as a thing to admire, but to study; not as an object of love, but as the subject of the most deep and difficult, although not steady, thinking. And now — now I shook in her presence, and went pale when she came near; yet, deeply sad about her fallen and lonely state, I remembered that she had loved me long, and, in a bad moment, I spoke to her of marriage.

And at last the time of our wedding was coming, when, on an afternoon in the winter of the year — one of those unusually warm, calm, and misty days which are the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon, (For as Jove, during winter, gives fourteen days of warmth, people have called this mild and calm time the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon — Simonides) — I sat, (and sat, as I thought, alone,) in the inner room of the library. But, lifting my eyes, I saw that Berenice stood before me.

Was it my own wild imagination — or the foggy effect of the air — or the unclear dim light of the room — or the gray curtains that hung around her body — that made its shape so shaky and unclear? I could not tell. She spoke no word; and I — not for anything could I have said a word. An icy chill ran through my body; a feeling of unbearable worry pressed on me; a strong curiosity filled my soul; and leaning back on the chair, I stayed for some time breathless and still, with my eyes fixed on her. Sadly! it was very thin, and not one trace of the person she was before was in any single line of the shape. My strong looks at last fell on the face.

The forehead was high, and very pale, and strangely calm; and the once very black hair fell partly over it, and shadowed the sunken temples with many curls, now a bright yellow, and clashing badly, in their strange style, with the deep sadness of the face. The eyes were without life, and dull, and seeming to have no pupils, and I drew back without meaning to from their blank stare to look at the thin and shrunken lips. They parted; and in a smile of strange meaning, the teeth of the changed Berenice showed themselves slowly to me. I wish to God that I had never seen them, or that, after seeing them, I had died!

The closing of a door bothered me, and, looking up, I found that my cousin had left the room. But from the troubled room of my mind, sadly, the white and terrible image of the teeth had not left, and would not go away. Not a spot on their surface — not a mark on their enamel — not a dent in their edges — that the moment of her smile had not burned into my memory. I saw them now even more clearly than I saw them then. The teeth! — the teeth! — they were here, and there, and everywhere, and clearly before me; long, thin, and very white, with the pale lips twisting about them, as if in the very moment of their first terrible appearance. Then came the full fury of my madness about one thing, and I struggled in vain against its strange and unstoppable power. In the many objects of the outside world I had no thoughts but for the teeth.

For these I longed with a wild desire. All other matters and all different interests were lost in thinking only about them. They — they alone were present in my mind, and they, by themselves, became the heart of the life of my mind. I looked at them in every light. I turned them in every position. I looked at their features. I kept thinking about what was odd about them. I thought about their shape. I thought about the change in their nature.

I shook with fear as I gave them, in my mind, a power to feel and live, and even without the lips, an ability to show what is good and bad. Of Mademoiselle Salle it has been well said, “that all her steps were feelings,” and of Berenice I more seriously believed “that all her teeth were ideas.” Ideas! — ah, here was the foolish thought that ruined me! Ideas! — ah, so that was why I wanted them so much! I felt that only owning them could ever bring me back to peace, by giving me back my mind.

And the evening came in on me like this — and then the darkness came, and stayed, and went — and the day came again — and the mists of a second night were now coming around — and still I sat without moving in that lonely room — and still I sat lost in thought — and still the phantom of the teeth kept its terrible power, as, with the clearest, ugliest sharpness, it floated around among the changing lights and shadows of the room.

At last a cry of horror and fear broke into my dreams; and then, after a pause, came the sound of troubled voices, mixed with many low moans of sadness or of pain. I rose from my seat, and throwing open one of the doors of the library, saw standing out in the outer room a servant girl, all in tears, who told me that Berenice was — dead! She had had a seizure in the early morning, and now, as night came, the grave was ready for her, and all the preparations for the funeral were finished.

I found myself sitting in the library, and again sitting there alone. It seemed that I had just woken up from a confused and exciting dream. I knew that it was now midnight, and I knew well, that since the sun went down, Berenice had been buried. But of that sad time which came between I had no clear, at least no exact, understanding. Yet its memory was full of horror — horror more horrible because it was vague, and fear more terrible because it was not clear. It was a scary page in the record of my life, written all over with faint, and ugly, and not understandable memories. I tried to figure them out, but it was no use; while now and then, like the echo of a sound that had passed, the high and sharp scream of a female voice seemed to be ringing in my ears. I had done something — what was it? I asked myself the question aloud, and the soft echoes of the room answered me, — “What was it?”

On the table beside me a lamp was burning, and near it lay a little box. It was not special, and I had seen it often before, because it belonged to the family doctor; but how did it come there, on my table, and why did I shiver when looking at it? There was no way to explain these things, and at last my eyes fell to the open pages of a book, and to a sentence underlined there. The words were the strange but simple ones of the poet Ebn Zaiat: — “Dicebant mihi sodales si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas.” Why then, as I read them, did the hairs on my head stand on end, and the blood in my body become frozen in my veins?

There was a light tap at the library door — and, pale as someone in a tomb, a servant entered on tiptoe. His face was wild with fear, and he spoke to me in a voice trembling, rough, and very low. What did he say? — I heard some broken sentences. He told of a wild cry breaking the silence of the night — of everyone in the house gathering together — of a search in the direction of the sound; and then his voice became very clear as he whispered to me of a grave that was broken into — of a damaged body wrapped in cloth, yet still breathing — still beating — still alive!

He pointed to the clothes; — they were muddy and covered with thick blood. I did not speak, and he took me gently by the hand: it had marks from human fingernails. He directed my attention to a thing against the wall. I looked at it for some minutes: it was a shovel. With a scream I jumped to the table, and grabbed the box that was on it. But I could not open it; and in my shaking, it slipped from my hands, and fell hard, and broke into pieces; and from it, with a loud rattle, there rolled out some tools for the dentist, mixed with thirty-two small, white and ivory-like things that were scattered here and there on the floor.