Hi and welcome back to Nighty Night, bedtime stories to keep you awake.

I'm your host, Ravi Achadri. This week's episode brings to life

one of my own greatest personal fears and fascinations, the big expanse of the ocean.

I have long been drawn to seafaring tails, and yet the fact that I can't even swim

keeps me terrified of wide open waters.

Who needs sea monsters when the sea itself can be monstrous?

MS found in a bottle by Edgar Allan Poe.

Of my country,

of my family,

of my family, I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one and estranged me from the other.

Hereditary wealth afforded me in education of no common order and a contemplative turn of mind enabled me to methodize the stores which early study very diligently garnered up.

Beyond all things, the study of the German moralists gave me great delight, not from any

ill-advised admiration of their eloquent madness, but from the ease with which my habits of

rigid thought enabled me to detect their falsities.

I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius.

A deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime, and the pyrrhonism of my opinions has at times rendered

me notorious.

Indeed, a strong relish for physical philosophy has, I fear, tinctured my mind with a very common error of this age. I mean the habit of

referring occurrences, even the least susceptible of such reference to the principles of

that science. Upon the whole, no person could be less liable than myself to be led away from the severe

precincts of truth by the Ignis Fatuie of superstition.

I have thought proper to premise thus much, lest the credible tale I have thought proper to premise thus much lest the credible tale I have to tell should be considered

...