The library in Egaeus’s family home represents his own mind, which he frequently retreats into both before and after his mental illness takes hold. Egaeus was born in the library, and he describes being born as “awaking” and coming into consciousness which mirrors the numerous times he returns to consciousness—always in the library—after one of his dissociative episodes when he loses “all sense of motion or physical existence.” A return to consciousness, then, is a return to the library. To Egaeus, the library is “a palace of imagination” and “the wild dominions of monastic thought” which, in time, bears a striking resemblance to the interior of his own mind: like the library, Egaeus’s mind becomes solitary and peculiar, devoted to thought and barring him from experiencing certain kinds of emotion. Just as Egaeus is irresistibly drawn to the library, he is also irresistibly drawn into his own mind, and he explores the “peculiar” books in the library in the same way he obsessively explores “peculiar” details in the margins of books or the sound of a word as his “monomaniac” mental illness takes control of his life.
The Library Quotes in Berenice
Here died my mother. Herein I was born. But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before—that the soul has no previous existence.
The Library Symbol Timeline in Berenice
