Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

2
Thomas De Quincey
Ma Chère Amie,
Common sense tells us that terrestrial things have but a faint
existence, and that reality itself is only found in dreams. As we have
to digest our natural and our artificial happiness, one requires all one’s
courage to swallow it, and those who most merit this happiness are
exactly those to whom human felicity, such as we mortals conceive it,
has always had the effect of an emetic.
To stupid spirits it might seem singular and even impertinent, that a
vision of artificial sensations should be dedicated to a woman, who is the
most natural source of the most natural sensualities. At the same time it
is evident that as the natural world penetrates the spiritual world, serves
as pasturage to it, and thus concurs in operating this indefinable mixture
that we name our individuality, that woman is the one being made to
project the greatest shadow or the greatest light over our dreams. Woman
is fatally suggestive; she lives with another life than her proper one; she
lives spiritually in the imaginations that she haunts and fertilises.
Besides, it is of little consequence that the reason of this Dedication
should be understood. Is it even necessary, for the writer’s satisfaction,
that any kind of book should be understood, except by him or by
her for whom it has been composed? Is it, indeed, indispensable that
it should have been written for anyone? I have, for my part, so little
taste for the living world that, like certain sensible and stay-at-home
women, who send, it is said, their letters by post to their imaginary
friends, willingly would I write only for the dead.
But it is not to a dead woman that I dedicate this little book; it
is to one who, though ill, is always active and living in me, and who
now turns her eyes in the direction of the skies, that realm of so many
transfigurations. For, just as in the case of a redoubtable drug, a living
being enjoys this privilege of being able to draw wonderful and subtle
luxuries from sorrow, from calamity and from fatality.
Thou wilt see in this narrative a man who walks in a sombre and
solitary fashion, plunged in the moving flood of multitudes, sending
his heart and his thoughts to a far-off Electra who so long ago wiped
his sweating forehead and refreshed his lips parched with fever ; and thou
wilt divine the gratitude of another Orestes whose nightmares thou
didst so often watch over, and of whom thou didst dissipate, with a
light and maternal hand, his slumbers abominable.
C. B.