Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

8
Thomas De Quincey
itself in you so abnormally, that the contemplation of exterior objects
makes you forget your own existence, and makes you confound yours
with theirs. Suppose you look on a tree waved by the wind in a few
seconds, what was not in the brain of a Poet no more than a natural
comparison, becomes in yours a reality. First you attribute to the tree
your passions, your desire and your melancholy; its sobs and oscillations
become yours, and before long you are the tree. In the same
sense, the bird who flies to the height of the skies represents first the
immortal desire of flying above things human; already you are yourself
the bird. I suppose you seated and smoking. Your attention will
find rest in the bluish clouds that rise from your pipe. The idea of an
evaporation, slow, successive, eternal, seizes your spirit; and you begin
to apply this idea to your proper thoughts, to your thinking matter.
Through a singular equivocation, by a kind of transposition or by some
intellectual quid pro quo, you will feel yourself evaporating, and you
will attribute to your pipe (in which you feel yourself crouching in one
lump on the tobacco) the strange faculty of smoking yourself (l’étrange
faculté de vous fumer).
Luckily, this interminable imagination only endured for a minute,
for an interval of lucidity, with an effort, when you examine the clock.
But another stream of ideas carries you away; which might plunge
you in an instant into a living whirlwind, and this other minute must
be another eternity. For the proportions of time and of being are
completely deranged by the multitude and the intensity of sensations,
and of ideas. One might say that one lives several lives in the
space of an hour. Are you not then like a fantastic novel which ought
to be living rather than written? There is no more equation between
the other organs and one’s enjoyments; and it is especially from this
consideration that the disapproval applicable to this dangerous exercise
where liberty disappears, surges.
[ . . . ]
For at first, when you are certain that a new dawn has risen on
the horizon of your existence, you experience something wonderful;
you imagine you are in possession of a marvellous spirituality. But no
sooner are you out of bed, than all that remains of the intoxication
follows and hinders you, like the chain of your recent servitude. You
can hardly walk and you fear at every instant that you might break
yourself like any fragile thing. An intense lassitude (there are some
who pretend it is not without a charm of its own) seizes your mind and