Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

20
Thomas De Quincey
that thus it gives on one side what it withdraws from another, that is
to say, imagination without the faculty of profiting by the imagination.
Finally, one must think, supposing a man who is adroit and vigorous
enough to escape from this alternative, of another danger, fatal,
terrible, which is that of all the customs. All these transformations
are necessary. One who could take poison so as to think would soon
be unable to think without taking poison. Can one conceive the awful
state of a man whose atrophied imagination would cease to function
without the help of Haschisch or Opium?
In Philosophical studies, the human mind, imitating the stars’
eternal movements, ought to follow a curve which brings it back
to its point of departure. To conclude, is to enclose a circle. At the
beginning I have spoken of this miraculous state, when a special grace
seems to descend on a man’s mind; I have said that aspiring endlessly
to warm his flesh and to raise his body towards the Infinite, he will
discover in all times and in all climes, a frantic, a frenzied taste for all
the substances, even those that are dangerous, which, as they exalt his
personality, might offer for an instant to his eyes a certain Paradise—ce
paradis d’occasion—in which he desires to attain his ultimate desires,
and that finally this hazardous spirit hurling itself, without knowing
it, into Hell, must bear witness to its original grandeur. But man is not
so abandoned, so deprived of honest means for gaining the sky, as to
be obliged to invoke pharmacy and Sorcery; he has no need to sell his
soul so as to pay for the intoxicating caresses of Eastern Concubines.
What is a Paradise if one buys it at the price of his eternal Salvation?
I imagine a man (a Brahman, a Poet, a Philosopher) seated on
the summit of the ardent Olympus of his spirituality; around him,
the Muses of Raphael and of Mantegna, to console him for his fasts
and his assiduous prayers, conceiving the most delicious dancing;
the divine Apollo, this Master of Quintessence (that of Francavilla,
of Albert Dürer, of Goltzius, or of others, what matters it? Is there
not an Apollo, for every man who has the merit of admiring him?)
caressing with his bow the most vibrating chords of his divine instrument.
Below him, at the foot of the mountain, in the mud and the
briars, the multitude of multitudes, the crowd of helots, simulates the
grimaces of enjoyment and utters howls against those who tear from
it the bite of the poison; and the saddened Poet says to himself: “These
unfortunate beings, who have never fasted, nor prayed, and who have
refused redemption by travail, demand from Black Magic the means of