The misfortune is varied. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Displayed by the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as varied as this, while so different and so closely together. Deployed by the wide horizon like a rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of ugliness, of the covenant of peace, a simile of sorrow? Just as in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, in fact the joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
My name is Egaeus; not say my name. However, no more towers in the land-honored than my gloomy, gloomy mansion. Our line has been called a race of visionaries, and in many striking details in the character of the family mansion in the cool main hall in the tapestries of the dormitories in the chiselling of some buttresses in the armory, but especially in the gallery of antique paintings in the style of the library, and finally, in the very peculiar nature of books, there is sufficient evidence to justify this belief.
The memories of my earliest years are connected with that chamber, and their books, no longer speak again. My mother died there. I was born there. But it is useless to say that I had not lived before, that the soul has no previous existence. Do you deny? Not discuss this point. I am convinced, I seek not to convince. However, there is a remembrance of aerial forms spiritual eyes and expressive musical sounds and sad, a memory that I can not be excluded; a memory like a shadow, vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady, and like a shadow, too, the impossibility of getting rid of it while the sunlight of my reason.
In that chamber was I born. When awaking from the long night of what seemed, but was not, the non-existence, to regions of fairies, a palace of imagination, the strange realms of thought and monastic scholarship is not surprising that I gazed around me with eyes wide and burning, that I loitered away my boyhood in books, and dissipated my youth in reverie, but it is singular to pass the years and the noon of manhood found me still in the house of my ancestors, it is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life, amazing investment in the character of my most common thoughts. The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas from the world of dreams, however, turned not on my everyday existence, but really in my cynical and full existence.
Berenice and I were cousins \u200b\u200band grew up together in my paternal halls. But grew up differently: I ill, wrapped in gloom it agile, graceful, full of strength, hers the ramble on the hill mine the studies of the cloister I living within my own heart, body and soul to the intense and painful meditation she roaming carelessly through life, without thought of the shadows of the road or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours. Berenice! "I call her name, Berenice! And at this sound a thousand tumultuous recollections are startled by the gray ruins. Ah, vividly is her image before me, as in the early days of joy and happiness! 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 story that should not be counted. The disease, a fatal disease-fell on her as the sirocco, and, while I gazed, the spirit of change swept, penetrating his mind, in their habits and character, and in the most subtle and terrible to alter even their identity. Ay! The destroyer came and went, and the victim ... where was I? I did not know, or at least no longer as Berenice.
Among the numerous diseases caused by that first and fatal, that a revolution of so horrible in the moral and physical development of my premium, should be mentioned as the most distressing and obstinate in a class of epilepsy not unfrequently terminating in trance, much like state to the extinction of life, which, in most instances, startlingly abrupt and sudden. Meanwhile, my own illness, as I have said that they should give it another name, my own illness, I say, grew very quickly, assuming a monomaniac character of a remarkable new species, which grew louder every passing hour and, finally, had on me an incomprehensible ascendancy. This monomania, if I have to call it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of mind that science termed the attentive. More than likely I would not explain, but I fear, indeed, there is no possible way to convey to the mind of the reader, an idea of \u200b\u200bthat nervous intensity of interest in my case the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves in the contemplation of the most common objects in the universe.
muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device on the margins of a book or in the topography, to be absorbed for the better part of a summer day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry or on the door to miss an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp or the embers of the fire; dream whole days over the perfume of a flower, repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, thanks to the frequent repetition, ceased to convey my mind some idea, losing all sense of motion or physical existence, by means of absolute bodily quiescence and stubborn, long maintained: these were some of the extravagances common and least pernicious induced a state of mental faculties, not really unique, but able to challenge any analysis or explanation.
But do not misunderstand me. The excessive intense and morbid attention thus excited by objects trivial in itself, not be confused with the tendency to meditation, common to all men, and are delivered in a particular persons of ardent imagination. Nor was it, as was at first supposed, an extreme condition or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and essentially distinct and different. In one case, the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions that arise from it, until the end of a dream often replete with luxury The incitamentum or first cause of his musings disappears completely and forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance. Few deductions, if any, were made, and those few turned stubbornly to the original object as a center. The meditations were never pleasurable, and at the end of the dream, the first cause, far out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In short, the powers exercised over the mind in my case were, as I said, the care, whereas in the case of the dreamer are speculation.
My books, at that time, if not actually serve to irritate the disorder, partook largely as will, by their imaginative and inconsequential nature, the peculiar characteristics of the disorder itself. I can remember, among others, the treaty of Italian noble Coelius Secundus Curio, De amplitudine beati regni Dei [The greatness of God's holy kingdom], the great work of St. Augustine, De civitate Dei [The City of God], and the Tertullian, De carne Christi [The flesh of Christ], as paradoxical statement: Mortuus est Dei filius: credibility ineptum est quia est, et sepultus resurrexit: certum est quia impossibile est, held for many weeks of futile and time-consuming Research all my time.
So will you, shaken from its balance only by trivial things, my reason bore resemblance to the marine rock that speaks Ptolemy Hephaestion, which steadily resisting the attacks of human violence and the fiercer fury of the water and wind, but trembled at the touch of the flower called Asphodel. And although unnoticed observer might seem beyond doubt that the alteration produced in the moral condition of Berenice by her unfortunate illness I would have provided many subjects for the exercise of that intense and abnormal meditation whose nature has cost me quite explain, without But it was not the case. In the lucid intervals of my infirmity, her calamity, I was sorry, and deeply moved by the utter ruin of his beautiful and gentle life, never stopped to ponder frequently and bitterly upon the wonder mechanisms that had reached a revolution so sudden and strange. But these reflections partook not of the idiosyncrasy of my disease, and were such as would have occurred under similar circumstances, to ordinary mortals. True to his own character, my disorder reveled in minor changes, but more startling, produced in the physical frame of Berenice, in the singular and most appalling distortion of their identity personal.
In the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, not loved. In the strange anomaly of my life, my feelings never came from the heart, and my passions always were of the mind. In the misty dawn, shadows entwined in the forest at noon and in the silence of my library at night, she had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen, not as living and breathing Berenice, but as a Berenice dream, not an inhabitant of the earth, but as the abstraction, not as something to admire, but to analyze, not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation. And now now I shuddered in his presence and turned pale when he approached, however, bitterly lamenting its decline and ruin, I remembered that I had loved me long, and, in an evil moment, I spoke of marriage.
And when, finally, approaching the date for our wedding, a winter afternoon in one of those unseasonably warm, and misty days which are the nurse of the beautiful Alcíone I was sitting (and I thought, only) in the cabinet inside the library and, looking up, saw that Berenice stood before me.
Was my vivid imagination, the influence of the hazy atmosphere, the uncertain twilight of the chamber, the gray draperies which fell around her figure that gave an outline so vacillating and indistinct? Can not say. She said nothing, and nothing in the world I would have uttered a syllable. An icy chill ran through my body, I pressed a sense of insufferable anxiety, a consuming curiosity pervaded my soul, and sinking back in his chair, I remained for some time breathless and motionless, with my eyes riveted on him. Ay! Its emaciation was excessive, and not one vestige of its former being, lurked in any single contour line. My burning glances at length fell upon his face.
The forehead was high, very pale, and strangely serene, as in a time-out jet black hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets now of a vivid yellow, bright, contrasting discordant in their fantastic character, with the melancholy of his face. His eyes were bright and seemingly pupil, and I shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare to see his lips thin and shrunken. They parted, and a peculiar smile of teeth of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my eyes. God grant that I had never seen or that, after seeing them, had died!
The stroke of a closing door disturbed me, and looking up, I discovered that my cousin had left the room. But from the disordered chamber of my brain, alas, had not come out or be driven away, the white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth. Not a speck on the surface, not a shade on the enamel, or a nick on the edges of the teeth had fleeting smile that is not recorded in my memory. Now saw more clearly than a moment before. Teeth! Teeth! They were here and there and everywhere, visibly and palpably before me, long, narrow, and excessively white, with pale lips writhing about them, as in the instant that had begun to grow. Then came all the fury of my monomania, and I struggled in vain against its strange and irresistible influence. Among the many objects of the external world thought of the teeth. Longed with a frenzied desire. All other concerns and other interests were subject to such contemplation. They, they were the only ones who were present to the mental eye, and in their sole individuality, became the essence of my intellectual life. Them in every aspect. I saw them from all perspectives. I surveyed their characteristics. Studied their peculiarities. I pondered upon their conformation. I thought of changing their nature. I shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive and sentient power, even without the help of the lips, a capability of moral expression. Mlle Sallé has rightly said that étaient tous ses pas des sentiments, and I thought seriously Berenice toutes ses dents étaient des idées. Des idées! Ah, the idiotic thought that destroyed me! Des idées! Ah, so coveted them so madly! I felt that their possession could bring peace to me, back to reason.
And the evening closed in upon me, and darkness came, and tarried, and the new day dawned, and the mists of a second night were now gathering around and I was sat motionless in that solitary room, and I sat buried in meditation, and the ghost of the teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy as, with the most vivid and horrible, it floated about amid the changing lights and shadows of the room. At length there broke in my dreams a cry of horror and dismay, and then after a pause, the sound of troubled voices, intermingled with many low moans of pain and sorrow. I rose from my seat and opened the doors of the library, I saw in the antechamber a servant, in tears, who told me that Berenice was gone. He had suffered a seizure early in the morning, and now, at nightfall, and was prepared the tomb to receive his tenant, and funeral arrangements.
I found myself sitting in the library, and again alone. It seemed that he had awakened from a confused and exciting dream. I knew it was midnight and that since the setting of the sun Berenice had been interred. But I had an exact idea, or at least defined, in this dreary period which intervened. However, the memory was replete with horror, horror more horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful page in the history of my existence, written memories, and hideous, and unintelligible. I struggled to decipher them, but to no avail, while Therefore, the spirit of a sound, the shrill and piercing shriek of a woman seemed to be ringing in my ears. I had done something. But what was it? I wondered 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 small box. He had a striking appearance, and I had seen before, because it belonged to the family doctor. But how he got there, my table, and why did I shudder in it? It was not worth taking into account these things, and at last my eyes fell upon the open pages a book and on an underlined phrase. It was strange but simple words of the poet Ebn Zaiat "Dicebant mihi sodales, if sepulchrum amicae visitarem, meas curates aliquantulum Levato fore." Why, to read, my hair stood on end and I froze the blood in your veins?
came a light knock on the door of the library and pale as the tenant of a tomb, a menial entered upon tiptoe. His looks were wild with terror, and spoke with a voice tremulous, husky and low. Say what? I heard a few broken sentences. He spoke of a wild cry disturbing the silence of the night, and the gathering together to find out where appropriate, and his voice recovered a creepy tone, of course, when I spoke, whispering, a desecrated grave of a body wrapped in the shroud and disfigured, but still breathing, still palpitating, still alive!
0 comments:
Post a Comment