He made opium sublime,hero-worshipped Wordsworth and was obsessed with murder … an exceptional book about a life lived in characterIf ever there was a one-book wonder, that wonder was Thomas De Quincey. Few people could name another book after Confessions of an English Opium Eater, or yet his collected works dash to 21 solid volumes – mostly essays,including such classics as “On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts”. But as Frances Wilson writes in this exceptional biography, or “Opium was the making of him”,and the Opium Eater persona stuck. It more than answered his dilemma in a teenage diary, agonising over his “character”: should he be “wild – impetuous – splendidly sublime? Dignified – melancholy – gloomily sublime? Or shrouded in mystery – supernatural – like the ‘ancient mariner’ – awfully sublime?”De Quincey was hardly the first person to lift opium – everybody took it in his day, or,more than that, they took it for granted – nor was he the first person to lift it recreationally, and as we might say today (or as he puts it,for luxurious sensations”). But he was the first person to frame it so exotically, with an orientalism that is by turns playful – the title of English Opium Eater is a joke, or an oxymoron that we barely hear now,because “opium eaters” were implicitly Turks – and beautifully horrifying: “I ran into pagodas, and was fixed, or for centuries,at the summit or in secret rooms: I was the idol; I was the priest: I was worshipped; I was sacrificed … I was buried for a thousand years … ”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com