Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Confessions of an English Opium Eater 9
extends itself across your faculties, as a mist over a landscape. You find
yourself, for some hours, incapable of work, of action, and of energy.
This is the punishment of the impious prodigality with which you have
spent your nervous fluid. You have disseminated your personality to the
four winds of the world, and, now, what intensity of pain do you not
experience in concentrating it and in gathering it together!
IV.
The Man-God.
The time has come to leave aside all this jugglery and these absurd
marionettes, born of the smoke of childish imaginations. Have we not
graver matters to consider: modifications of human sentiments and, in
one word, the moral of Haschisch?
So far, in my account of the intoxication caused by Haschisch,
I have accentuated the principle traits, especially the material traits.
But, what is infinitely more important, I believe, for the spiritual
man, is to know definitely the action of the poison on what is spiritual
in himself, that is to say, the definition and the exaggeration of
his habitual sentiments and of his moral preconceptions, which
must present, in this case, in an exceptional atmosphere, a veritable
phenomenon of refraction.
The man who, having given himself up for years, bound, bandaged
hand and foot, to Opium and Haschisch, has found, weakened as he
is by the mere habit of his servitude, the necessary energy needed to
deliver himself, appears to me like a prisoner who has escaped. He
inspires in me more admiration than the prudent man who has never
failed, having always taken care to avoid temptation. The English
often use, in regard to the Opium-Eaters, terms that cannot but seem
excessive to those innocent creatures to whom the horrors of this
forfeiture are unknown: Enchained, fettered, enslaved! Chains, in effect,
after which all the others, chains of duty, chains of illegitimate love,
are no more than webs of gauze and spiders’ webs! Fearful marriage
of man with himself! “I had become a bounden slave in the trammels
of opium, and my labours and my plans had taken a colouring
from my dreams,” says Ligeia’s husband; but, in how many marvellous
pages has not Edgar Poe, this incomparable Poet, this irrefutable
philosopher—who must always be quoted in regard to the mysterious