Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey (smart books to read .TXT) 📖

to great distances, for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time; and sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and head-lands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphynx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen.  I could almost have believed at times that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terræ incognitæ, and doubted whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London.  For all this, however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannised over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep, with the feeling of perplexities, moral and intellectual, that brought confusion to the reason, or anguish and remorse to the conscience.

Thus I have shown that opium does not of necessity produce inactivity or torpor, but that, on the contrary, it often led me into markets and theatres.  Yet, in candour, I will admit that markets and theatres are not the appropriate haunts of the opium-eater when in the divinest state incident to his enjoyment.  In that state, crowds become an oppression to him; music even, too sensual and gross.  He naturally seeks solitude and silence, as indispensable conditions of those trances, or profoundest reveries, which are the crown and consummation of what opium can do for human nature.  I, whose disease it was to meditate too much and to observe too little, and who upon my first entrance at college was nearly falling into a deep melancholy, from brooding too much on the sufferings which I had witnessed in London, was sufficiently aware of the tendencies of my own thoughts to do all I could to counteract them.  I was, indeed, like a person who, according to the old legend, had entered the cave of Trophonius; and the remedies I sought were to force myself into society, and to keep my understanding in continual activity upon matters of science.  But for these remedies I should certainly have become hypochondriacally melancholy.  In after years, however, when my cheerfulness was more fully re-established, I yielded to my natural inclination for a solitary life.  And at that time I often fell into these reveries upon taking opium; and more than once it has happened to me, on a summer night, when I have been at an open window, in a room from which I could overlook the sea at a mile below me, and could command a view of the great town of L---, at about the same distance, that I have sate from sunset to sunrise, motionless, and without wishing to move.

I shall be charged with mysticism, Behmenism, quietism, &c., but that shall not alarm me.  Sir H. Vane, the younger, was one of our wisest men; and let my reader see if he, in his philosophical works, be half as unmystical as I am.  I say, then, that it has often struck me that the scene itself was somewhat typical of what took place in such a reverie.  The town of L--- represented the earth, with its sorrows and its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgotten.  The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it.  For it seemed to me as if then first I stood at a distance and aloof from the uproar of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife were suspended; a respite granted from the secret burthens of the heart; a sabbath of repose; a resting from human labours.  Here were the hopes which blossom in the paths of life reconciled with the peace which is in the grave; motions of the intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon calm; a tranquillity that seemed no product of inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; infinite activities, infinite repose.

Oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for “the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,” bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure from blood; and to the proud man a brief oblivion for

Wrongs undress’d and insults unavenged;

that summonest to the chancery of dreams, for the triumphs of suffering innocence, false witnesses; and confoundest perjury, and dost reverse the sentences of unrighteous judges;—thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles—beyond the splendour of Babylon and Hekatómpylos, and “from the anarchy of dreaming sleep” callest into sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties and the blessed household countenances cleansed from the “dishonours of the grave.”  Thou only givest these gifts to man; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!

INTRODUCTION TO THE PAINS OF OPIUM

Courteous, and I hope indulgent, reader (for all my readers must be indulgent ones, or else I fear I shall shock them too much to count on their courtesy), having accompanied me thus far, now let me request you to move onwards for about eight years; that is to say, from 1804 (when I have said that my acquaintance with opium first began) to 1812.  The years of academic life are now over and gone—almost forgotten; the student’s cap no longer presses my temples; if my cap exist at all, it presses those of some youthful scholar, I trust, as happy as myself, and as passionate a lover of knowledge.  My gown is by this time, I dare say, in the same condition with many thousand excellent books in the Bodleian, viz., diligently perused by certain studious moths and worms; or departed, however (which is all that I know of his fate), to that great reservoir of somewhere to which all the tea-cups, tea-caddies, tea-pots, tea-kettles, &c., have departed (not to speak of still frailer vessels, such as glasses, decanters, bed-makers, &c.), which occasional resemblances in the present generation of tea-cups, &c., remind me of having once possessed, but of whose departure and final fate I, in common with most gownsmen of either university, could give, I suspect, but an obscure and conjectural history.  The persecutions of the chapel-bell, sounding its unwelcome summons to six o’clock matins, interrupts my slumbers no longer, the porter who rang it, upon whose beautiful nose (bronze, inlaid with copper) I wrote, in retaliation so many Greek epigrams whilst I was dressing, is dead, and has ceased to disturb anybody; and I, and many others who suffered much from his tintinnabulous propensities, have now agreed to overlook his errors, and have forgiven him.  Even with the bell I am now in charity; it rings, I suppose, as formerly, thrice a-day, and cruelly annoys, I doubt not, many worthy gentlemen, and disturbs their peace of mind; but as to me, in this year 1812, I regard its treacherous voice no longer (treacherous I call it, for, by some refinement of malice, it spoke in as sweet and silvery tones as if it had been inviting one to a party); its tones have no longer, indeed, power to reach me, let the wind sit as favourable as the malice of the bell itself could wish, for I am 250 miles away from it, and buried in the depth of mountains.  And what am I doing among the mountains?  Taking opium.  Yes; but what else?  Why reader, in 1812, the year we are now arrived at, as well as for some years previous, I have been chiefly studying German metaphysics in the writings of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, &c.  And how and in what manner do I live?—in short, what class or description of men do I belong to?  I am at this period—viz. in 1812—living in a cottage and with a single female servant (honi soit qui mal y pense), who amongst my neighbours passes by the name of my “housekeeper.”  And as a scholar and a man of learned education, and in that sense a gentleman, I may presume to class myself as an unworthy member of that indefinite body called gentlemen.  Partly on the ground I have assigned perhaps, partly because from my having no visible calling or business, it is rightly judged that I must be living on my private fortune; I am so classed by my neighbours; and by the courtesy of modern England I am usually addressed on letters, &c., “Esquire,” though having, I fear, in the rigorous construction of heralds, but slender pretensions to that distinguished honour; yet in popular estimation I am X. Y. Z., Esquire, but not justice of the Peace nor Custos Rotulorum.  Am I married?  Not yet.  And I still take opium?  On Saturday nights.  And perhaps have taken it unblushingly ever since “the rainy Sunday,” and “the stately Pantheon,” and “the beatific druggist” of 1804?  Even so.  And how do I find my health after all this opium-eating?  In short, how do I do?  Why, pretty well, I thank you, reader; in the phrase of ladies in the straw, “as well as can be expected.”  In fact, if I dared to say the real and simple truth, though, to satisfy the theories of medical men, I ought to be ill, I never was better in my life than in the spring of 1812; and I hope sincerely that the quantity of claret, port, or “particular Madeira,” which in all probability you, good reader, have taken, and design to take for every term of eight years during your natural life, may as little disorder your health as mine was disordered by the opium I had taken for eight years, between 1804 and 1812.  Hence you may see again the danger of taking any medical advice from Anastasius; in divinity, for aught I know, or law, he may be a safe counsellor; but not in medicine.  No; it is far better to consult Dr. Buchan, as I did; for I never forgot that worthy man’s excellent suggestion, and I was “particularly careful not to take above five-and-twenty ounces of laudanum.”  To this moderation and temperate use of the article I may ascribe it, I suppose, that as yet, at least (i.e. in 1812), I am ignorant and unsuspicious of the avenging terrors which opium has in store for those who abuse its lenity.  At the same time, it must not be forgotten that hitherto I have been only a dilettante eater of opium; eight years’ practice even, with a single precaution of allowing sufficient intervals between every indulgence, has not been sufficient to make opium necessary to me as an article of daily diet.  But now comes a different era.  Move on, if you please, reader, to 1813.  In the summer of the year we have just quitted I have suffered much in bodily health from distress of mind connected with a very melancholy event.  This event being no ways related to the subject now before me, further than through the bodily illness which it produced, I need not more particularly notice.  Whether this illness of 1812 had any share in that of 1813 I know not; but so it was, that in the latter year I was attacked by a most appalling irritation of the stomach, in all respects the same as that which had caused me so much suffering in youth, and accompanied by a revival of all the old dreams.  This is the point of my narrative on which, as respects my own self-justification, the whole of what follows may be said to hinge.  And here I find myself in a perplexing dilemma.  Either, on the one hand, I must exhaust the reader’s patience by such a detail of my malady, or of my struggles with it, as might suffice to establish the fact of my inability to wrestle any longer with irritation and constant suffering; or, on the other hand, by passing lightly over this critical part of my story, I must forego the benefit of a stronger impression left on the mind of the reader, and must lay myself open to the misconstruction of having slipped, by the easy and gradual steps of self-indulging persons, from the first to the final stage of opium-eating (a misconstruction to which there will be a lurking predisposition in most readers, from my previous acknowledgements).  This is the dilemma, the first horn of which would be sufficient to toss and gore any column of patient readers, though drawn up sixteen deep and constantly