Children’s books traffic in nonstop peril, yet don’t prepare us for the very real dangers we face as adults — genuine spine tinglers like your marriage failing, the stock market collapsing or receiving some dreaded diagnosis. Instead, we’re warned about shipwreck and wizards, exotic threats that in the full light of age appear as flimsy as a Scooby-Doo ghost.
It would be easy to lump Edgar Allan Poe’s work in with that childish pile. After all, most American children are force-fed at least a few of his tales in school. To read Poe as an adult, however, is to realize that he knew everything about real adult fear and to discover how his insights into the human condition are as bracing as they are terrifying. This January, take a moment to revisit his works and see if the experience doesn’t leave you the tiniest bit happier and wiser, quicker to smile at human folly and even, against all odds, feeling more alive. Yes, reading some 19th-century torture fiction could improve your mental health.
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Modern science has repeatedly shown how beneficial reading is for our mental health, and works of horror remain popular because they offer us a safe outlet in which to explore our fears and find catharsis. Poe’s vision cuts still deeper. At his darkest and most goth, he’s also at his most satirical, but you have to be a grown-up to get the jokes. Take “The Tell-Tale Heart,” one of his best-known stories, in which the unnamed narrator murders his roommate because he can’t stand the roommate’s walleye — and then, just as he’s about to get away with it, hysterically confesses his guilt anyway.
It doesn’t matter how smart you are, Poe hints — you can’t escape your conscience. We all know this, yet the dark temptations still arrive as regularly as Amazon packages. What a ridiculous situation! How essentially absurd is the human condition, the way you and I are, at once, good people striving to be good and bad people itching to be bad? Reading Poe as an adult returns you to such fundamental questions, and where a movie might take two hours to develop these themes, he gets you there in 10 minutes.
Poe obviously had a dark thought or three himself. He knows your thought crimes, too. In 1845’s “The Imp of the Perverse,” half essay, half story, he described how humans do things precisely because they know they shouldn’t — revealing his own self-sabotaging tendencies and yours — 100 years before scientists formalized the theory of “psychological reactance,” or the way we resent even benign restrictions on our behavior. That awful urge you feel to peer off a roof, spill a secret, steal a Danish pastry, key a car? It’s universal. Folk wisdom long has anticipated science, but Poe’s perception is so dead-on, it’s spooky. This is a major reason his work has endured for nearly two centuries, fascinating readers around the globe, so that while the guy never dreamed of such a platform, he now boasts 4 million Facebook fans.
Poe’s catalogue hits all the modern yet timeless fears, from addiction and doing something awful because you can’t help yourself (“The Black Cat”), to rivalry gone too far (“The Cask of Amontillado”). It’s chilling to recognize how challenging our moral situation is and to witness how frail we are in the face of it. But you feel seen, too — less alone, less stranded in our current awful moment.
Poe’s own life was a series of grotesque challenges. He lost his mother and father before he turned 3, then later, his beloved wife died of the same disease (tuberculosis) that had killed his parents. His professional life proved just as unsatisfying. He worked low-wage editorial jobs, never earning an annual income exceeding $30,000 in today’s money, and his great ambition to launch his own magazine failed because he couldn’t raise the venture capital. The grief and disappointment encouraged him to act out in predictable if not always admirable ways, like getting stinky drunk over and over, and picking stupid, unwinnable fights.
So it’s no wonder that, across the body of work, you see Poe piling up the absurd and yet mortal scenarios, his characters landing in one ridiculous but high-stakes dilemma after another, with our tendency to self-sabotage inevitably presented as the kicker — the punchline to the whole dark joke. Poe is portraying our larger dilemma on a grand scale: The nightmare is the world we live in, but it’s also the self, so even more inescapable.
Correspondingly, Poe was the opposite of a Utopian. He expressed profound skepticism about what progress can achieve. In “Some Words with a Mummy,” another hit from 1845, scientists revive the titular Egyptian only to hear that their own glittering age of technology and enlightenment in fact represents a fall, an awful regression. It’s a funny although manifestly angry send-up of the entire idea of progress, suggesting mankind moves backward, not forward.
“I have no faith in human perfectibility,” Poe told a friend. “I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.” Voltaire needed 400 pages to reach the same conclusion in his epic Essay on Universal History, declaring that because the human heart is so twisted, so conflicted and set against itself, all history turns out to be “a continuous succession of crimes and disasters.”
Even this is edifying to contemplate, imparting a sense of limit, functioning as a check on our hubris. Maybe we are no better than anyone else in history, no more enlightened, no more accomplished. Perhaps we can’t make this world perfect, at least not in the ways we hope to, because there’s no such thing as “solving” our problems, only coping somehow. It could be that all we can control is our own selves, barely, and the most we can do is leave a legacy for those who come after us. Poe himself, for all his understandable gloom, dedicated his life to appreciating and creating beauty. What should we do with these dark thoughts we can’t escape, in this absurd dilemma we find ourselves in? Following his example, we should make art — and jokes.
And so this very night, you should shut your chamber door and read some Poe, or simply go on YouTube and listen to James Earl Jones reciting “The Raven.” Doing so will make you feel like a kid again, just a little bit. It’ll give you strength, too, to face the real, adult challenges you’re facing — whatever they are. This being 2022, I take it for granted you’ve got a few.
Catherine Baab-Muguira is a writer based in Midlothian. She’ll be speaking about Poe at the Library of Virginia at noon on Jan. 19. Admission is free. Contact her at: catbaabmuguira@gmail.com