One thing I really appreciate about Poe’s stories is the way his language is able to capture certain parts of the human condition. Though the intense and lengthy descriptions made a few of these stories a bit more difficult to read and caused the plot to drag, I felt a certain sentiment of manic obsession or almost paranoia was a common pattern in most of Poe’s work. The presence of opium and the way its effects seem to intensify these emotions/conditions is also a continuing theme. Certainly in “Ligeia”, the reader can practically feel the way the narrator’s heart yearns for this woman. The way this love and obsession is portrayed so beautifully, to me, is what made the loss so heartbreaking and palpable. Then, in the latter half when the second wife is dying, the kind of manic paranoia that we see the narrator go through, as he is experiencing such sinister dejavu, is written so well. The narrator describes the woman’s struggle, and the way she seemingly comes back to life repeatedly before really dying. To me, it was clear all along that the narrator was really just picturing Ligea in front of him once again, and whether or not the body was actually coming in and out of life (or if this was an illusion/hallucination), the obsessive paranoia and fear he felt watching the life leave this woman before him, and the way his mind kept bringing him back to visions of Ligeia, captured a very nuanced state of mania that was fascinating to read. Similarly, in “A Man of the Crowd”, the narrator is absolutely obsessed with keeping eyes on the man in the crowd, and is astute in their observations of his every expression and movement. There is this urgency in the tone that portrays the urgency to keep the man in view, and undertones of paranoia as the narrator relentlessly tracks the man and then expresses unsettling sentiments about the fact that among us there are always “criminals” or those with secrets to hide. Of course, in “The Fall of the House of Usher” the narrator has this nagging feeling that he must go into this house; he sees it and describes the fear and unsettling feelings associated with the house, and yet, there is still this relentless desire that leads to an blinding obsession with exploring the house and understanding what is going on inside, and even agreeing to the extremely strange idea of keeping Madeleines body in the walls, regardless of the absurdity and disturbance that is evident here. I could go on about how these haunting layers of mental spiral are unraveled in each of these tales, and how the opium at play is interwoven to intensify this. It certainly is impressive how Poe writes such complex mental states so impeccably, and it left me with a dark unsettledness which is likely exactly the impact he had hoped to have on readers. I also in many ways found myself empathizing with narrators/characters which were objectively mentally unstable or off kilter, and not really realizing because of the way I was enveloped in the story. In many ways, I suppose I then temporarily lived and exemplified some kind of mania, obsession, and paranoia in my own kind of way!