Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

16
Thomas De Quincey
a lover thinking with a kind of sadness (in his normal state) backward
to a storm-tossed past; bitterness might perhaps change into sweetness;
the need of pardon might make the imagination more suppliant,
and remorse itself, in the diabolical Drama that express itself only in
a long monologue, might act as excitant. Was I wrong in saying that
Haschisch appeared, to an actually philosophical spirit, like a perfectly
Satanical instrument? Remorse, so singular an ingredient of pleasure,
can easily be drowned in the delicious contemplation of remorse, in a
kind of voluptuous analysis; and this analysis is so rapid that man, this
natural Devil, does not perceive how involuntary such sins are, and
how near, from instant to instant, he approaches diabolical perfection.
He admires his remorse, he glorifies it, exactly at the sinister hour
when he is about to lose his liberty.
My imaginary man—the spirit of my own choice—has arrived at
that peculiar state of joy in which he is constrained to admire himself.
All contradiction is effaced, all problematical questions are solved. He
attains the joy of existence. The plenitude of his actual life inspires in
him an immeasurable pride. A voice speaks to him (alas! it is his own
voice), and says to him: “You have the right to consider yourself as
being superior to the hosts of men; no one knows all that you think
and all that you feel. You are a King over all the passions, you live in
the solitude of your convictions; you possess an immense contempt.”
We can certainly suppose that from time to time a biting sensation
traverses one’s joy. An exterior suggestion might revive a disagreeable
past. How many vile and stupid actions does not one’s past reveal
to one, which are veritably unworthy of this King of thought and
which can soil his dignity? You must believe that the man who takes
Haschisch is fated to confront reproachful ghosts of memory that
surge before his vision, and that he can derive from these hideous
shapes rarer elements of pride and of pleasure. Such must be the
evolution of his reason: the first sensation of sorrow once over, he
must analyse curiously this action or this sentiment whose memory
has disturbed its actual glorification, the motives that made him act in
this particular fashion, the circumstances with which he is surrounded,
and if he does not find reasons enough in these circumstances, if
not for the absolution, at least for the attenuation of his sin, do not
imagine that he feels himself vanquished! I assist at his reasoning as
at the tricks of a mechanism behind a transparent glass: “This ridiculous,
cowardly, vile action, whose memory has for an instant agitated