I Knew Him, Horatio - Rappaccini’s Daughter

Rappaccini’s Daughter

Mar. 16th, 2005 | 12:00 am

meta-creation_date: 3/15/2005 23:09:54

“We die by degrees,” and she is hastening the process. Since I have become once more trusted (that is, trusted to have no romantic intent), all those things we once were and once we had are reappearing in our friendship — all those things which once I was sure meant love. It is, to use a cliché, an exquisite pain and a torturous pleasure: a joy which must be borne and a sorrow to which I cling.

She is trying to kill me. No, she has no inkling of what she does; but just so surely as if she were gradually dosing me with arsenic, she is withering my soul.

I could easily run. I could easily leave her company and live a bright, colourful, and dissatisfying life elsewhere and elsewhen. But to do that would be worse than to show myself not a man: it would be to impose upon her the knowledge of her actions’ full import. Before me is on the one, suicide; and on the other, her indictment, her guilt. So help me, I cannot be the one to destroy her fragile conception of how easily problems may be set aside: I must slay myself. But, oh! what hands to slay me, and what lips to kiss my soul an eternal farewell. I would rather die by her hands than live by any other’s.

To remain is to allow that fatal arsenic, that lovely purple venom from this Rappaccini’s daughter, to innervate my being and gradually entangle me in such a Muse’s web of death that I be both unable and unwilling to resist sure destruction. To leave is to cause the shadow of such a fate to pass before her eyes and awaken her to the dread power held within them.

Nay. I shall gaze into these twin pools of despair as long as I am naïvely bidden so.
I fall. I sink. I drown. Posted via Passage to Serendipity

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