Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Оглавление

Томас Де Квинси. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

TO THE READER

PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS

PART II

THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM

INTRODUCTION TO THE PAINS OF OPIUM

THE PAINS OF OPIUM

May 1818

June 1819

APPENDIX

Отрывок из книги

These preliminary confessions, or introductory narrative of the youthful adventures which laid the foundation of the writer’s habit of opium-eating in after-life, it has been judged proper to premise, for three several reasons:

1.  As forestalling that question, and giving it a satisfactory answer, which else would painfully obtrude itself in the course of the Opium Confessions—“How came any reasonable being to subject himself to such a yoke of misery; voluntarily to incur a captivity so servile, and knowingly to fetter himself with such a sevenfold chain?”—a question which, if not somewhere plausibly resolved, could hardly fail, by the indignation which it would be apt to raise as against an act of wanton folly, to interfere with that degree of sympathy which is necessary in any case to an author’s purposes.

.....

So blended and intertwisted in this life are occasions of laughter and of tears, that I cannot yet recall without smiling an incident which occurred at that time, and which had nearly put a stop to the immediate execution of my plan.  I had a trunk of immense weight, for, besides my clothes, it contained nearly all my library.  The difficulty was to get this removed to a carrier’s: my room was at an aërial elevation in the house, and (what was worse) the staircase which communicated with this angle of the building was accessible only by a gallery, which passed the head-master’s chamber door.  I was a favourite with all the servants, and knowing that any of them would screen me and act confidentially, I communicated my embarrassment to a groom of the head-master’s.  The groom swore he would do anything I wished, and when the time arrived went upstairs to bring the trunk down.  This I feared was beyond the strength of any one man; however, the groom was a man

and had a back as spacious as Salisbury Plain.  Accordingly he persisted in bringing down the trunk alone, whilst I stood waiting at the foot of the last flight in anxiety for the event.  For some time I heard him descending with slow and firm steps; but unfortunately, from his trepidation, as he drew near the dangerous quarter, within a few steps of the gallery, his foot slipped, and the mighty burden falling from his shoulders, gained such increase of impetus at each step of the descent, that on reaching the bottom it trundled, or rather leaped, right across, with the noise of twenty devils, against the very bedroom door of the Archididascalus.  My first thought was that all was lost, and that my only chance for executing a retreat was to sacrifice my baggage.  However, on reflection I determined to abide the issue.  The groom was in the utmost alarm, both on his own account and on mine, but, in spite of this, so irresistibly had the sense of the ludicrous in this unhappy contretemps taken possession of his fancy, that he sang out a long, loud, and canorous peal of laughter, that might have wakened the Seven Sleepers.  At the sound of this resonant merriment, within the very ears of insulted authority, I could not myself forbear joining in it; subdued to this, not so much by the unhappy étourderie of the trunk, as by the effect it had upon the groom.  We both expected, as a matter of course, that Dr. – would sally, out of his room, for in general, if but a mouse stirred, he sprang out like a mastiff from his kennel.  Strange to say, however, on this occasion, when the noise of laughter had ceased, no sound, or rustling even, was to be heard in the bedroom.  Dr. – had a painful complaint, which, sometimes keeping him awake, made his sleep perhaps, when it did come, the deeper.  Gathering courage from the silence, the groom hoisted his burden again, and accomplished the remainder of his descent without accident.  I waited until I saw the trunk placed on a wheelbarrow and on its road to the carrier’s; then, “with Providence my guide,” I set off on foot, carrying a small parcel with some articles of dress under my arm; a favourite English poet in one pocket, and a small 12mo volume, containing about nine plays of Euripides, in the other.

.....