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A lo largo de la historia, algunos libros han cambiado el mundo. Han transformado la manera en que nos vemos a nosotros mismos y a los demás. Han inspirado el debate, la discordia, la guerra y la revolución. Han iluminado, indignado, provocado y consolado. Han enriquecido vidas, y también las han destruido. Taurus publica las obras de los grandes pensadores, pioneros, radicales y visionarios cuyas ideas sacudieron la civilización y nos impulsaron a ser quienes somos. Describiendo las surrealistas alucinaciones, el insomnio y las visiones de pesadilla que experimentó mientras consumía grandes dosis diarias de láudano, el legendario relato de Thomas De Quincey sobre los placeres y los tormentos del opio forjó un vínculo entre la autoexpresión artística y la adicción, y allanó el camino para futuras generaciones de escritores que experimentaron con el consumo de drogas, de Baudelaire a Burroughs.… (más)
lemontwist: I like On Wine and Hashish better but Baudelaire was clearly influenced by the work of De Quincey, and I think the two essays are well paired.
A lo largo del siglo XIX, cuando el uso del opio en Occidente comenzó a difundirse por entre los varios estratos sociales y su circulación comercial provocaba conflictos bélicos como la Guerra del Opio entre China y Gran Bretaña de 1839 a 1842, las Confesiones de un inglés comedor de opio se constituyen en un documento excepcional de los hábitos y reflexiones de un adicto literato de la época.
First published in 1821, Confessions of an English Opium Eater was the book that kick-started Thomas De Quincey's literary career and the one that would ultimately lead to his canonisation as the patron saint of the erudite addict and the bookish dipsomaniac. Until then, he had been living in Wordsworth's cottage at Grasmere, scratching a living from his translations of German writers and feeding a laudanum habit acquired at the age of 19. This new edition displays the range of the author's learning, not only in classical and English literature, but in the Enlightenment philosophy that had been sweeping across Europe since his youth.
Certain moments of the narrative stand out with the kind of vividness De Quincey ascribes to an opium dream. The friendship with a young prostitute who saved his life and whom he lost among the thronging London crowds. The disquisition on music, which, in an 11-word parenthesis, gives as succinct a summary of Kantian aesthetics as can be imagined. Above all, the extraordinary prose hymn to the joys of winter, a warm cottage, a good library and a pot of hot tea.
"Nothing," writes De Quincey in his preface, "is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars." Confessions confounded that theory by the sheer force of its style and launched the memoir of intoxication on to the literary scene. With Mill's Autobiography and Hazlitt's Liber Amoris, it is one of the classics of 19th-century life writing and its influence is still felt: to it we owe the mescaline experiments of Huxley and Michaux and the bleak satisfactions of Burroughs's Junky
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
To the Reader.--I here present you, courteous reader, with the record of a remarkable period in my life: according to my application of it, I trust that it will prove, not merely an interesting record, but, in a considerable degree, useful and instructive.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.
I thus give the reader some abstraction of my oriental dreams, which always filled me with such amazement at the monstrous scenery, that horror seemed absorbed, for a while, in sheer astonishment. (From 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater')
" I say: for there is one celebrated man of the present day, who if all be true which is reported of him, has greatly exceeded me in quantity."
Death we can face: but knowing, as some of us do, what is human life, which of us is it that without shuddering could (if consciously we were summoned) face the hour of birth? (last line of 'Suspiria de Profundis')
No dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself with the indeterminate and mysterious.
(from 'The English Mail-Coach')
Ah, reader! when I look back upon those days, it seems to me that all things change or perish. Even thunder and lightning, it pains me to say, are not the thunder and lightning which I seem to remember from the time of Waterloo. Roses, I fear, are degenerating, and, without a Red revolution, must come to the dust.
The late Duke of Norfolk used to say, ‘Next Monday, wind and weather permitting, I purpose to be drunk’. (Part Two: The Pleasures of Opium.)
… from Lord Bacon’s Essay on Death: — ‘It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant perhaps the one is as painful as the other.’ (Part Three: The Pains of Opium.)
A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed. (Part Three: The Pains of Opium.)
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Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
A thousand times, amongst the phantoms of sleep, has he shown thee to me, standing before the golden dawn, and teady to enter its gates--with the dreadful Word going before thee--with the armies of the grave behind thee; shown thee to me, sinking rising, fluttering, fainting, but then suddenly reconciled, adoring: a thousand times has he followed thee in the worlds of sleep--through storms; through desert seas; through the darkness of quicksands; through fugues and the persecution of fugues; through dreams, and the dreadful ressurections that are in dreams--only that at the last, with one motion of his victorious arm, he might record and emblazon the endless resurrections of his love!
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
This is a short to medium length book, containing between less than 100 pages (in the first edition) and 275 pages (in the edition of 1856). Do not combine with editions that include "Other Writings" by the same author.
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Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
A lo largo de la historia, algunos libros han cambiado el mundo. Han transformado la manera en que nos vemos a nosotros mismos y a los demás. Han inspirado el debate, la discordia, la guerra y la revolución. Han iluminado, indignado, provocado y consolado. Han enriquecido vidas, y también las han destruido. Taurus publica las obras de los grandes pensadores, pioneros, radicales y visionarios cuyas ideas sacudieron la civilización y nos impulsaron a ser quienes somos. Describiendo las surrealistas alucinaciones, el insomnio y las visiones de pesadilla que experimentó mientras consumía grandes dosis diarias de láudano, el legendario relato de Thomas De Quincey sobre los placeres y los tormentos del opio forjó un vínculo entre la autoexpresión artística y la adicción, y allanó el camino para futuras generaciones de escritores que experimentaron con el consumo de drogas, de Baudelaire a Burroughs.
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