Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Confessions of an English Opium Eater 13
life like a magic mirror; it colours it solemnly and darkens its depth.
Vague landscapes, flying horizons, perspectives of white cities whitened
by the cadaverous lividity of the Dawn, or illuminated by the
concentrated ardours of setting suns—depths of space, allegory of the
depth of time—the dance, the gesture or the declamation of the comic
actors, if you happen to be in a theatre—the first phrase that starts
to your lips, when your eyes fall on a book—in one world, and finally,
the universality of Beings surges before you with an unimaginable
glory. Grammar, the arid grammar, becomes something like an evoked
sorcery; words resuscitated clothe themselves in flesh and bones, the
substantive, in its substantial majority, the adjective, a transparent
vestment that colours it like the glazing on a painting, and the Verb,
angel of movement, that gives the swing to the phrase. Music, another
language dear to idle or to deep minds who seek for relaxation in the
variety of their creations, speaks to you and relates to you your Life’s
Poem; it incorporates itself in you, and you melt into it. Music speaks
your passions, not in an indefinite and vague manner, as it does in your
negligent nights, or on an opera night, but in a circumstantial, positive
manner, each cadence of the rhythm marking the malicious cadence
of your soul, each note transforming itself into a word, as the entire
poem enters your head like a Dictionary gifted with life.
You must not believe that all these circumlocutions of life produce
themselves confusedly in the mind, with the shrill accent of reality
and the disorder of exterior life. The inward vision transforms all
things and gives to everything that exquisite perfection which makes
beauty more beautiful. It is to this essentially voluptuous and sensual
phase that one must attribute the love of limpid waters, flowing and
stagnant, which develop themselves so astonishingly in the cerebral
intoxication of certain artists. The mirrors become a pretext for
certain dreams that have a curious resemblance with spiritual thirst,
joined with that physical thirst that dries the throat, of which I have
spoken; then the escape of waters, les jeux d’eau, harmonious cascades,
the immense cobalt-blue of the sea, sing, sleep with an inexpressible
charm. Water extends before one’s vision with a veritable enchantment,
and, in spite of the fact that I don’t put much trust in the furious
follies caused by Haschisch, I can’t affirm that the contemplation of a
limpid gulf might not be without a certain peril for a spirit amorous
of space and of crystal, and that the ancient fable of Undine might not
become for the enthusiast a tragic reality.