Sublime

William (Willi) F. Unsoeld, Ph.D.: 36, Corvallis, Oregon; Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Oregon State University, on leave as deputy Peace Corps representative in Nepal; Climbing leader.

How easy it was to destroy a man’s good name and reputation by suggesting he was in some way subversive or by calling him a communist.

The label ‘neurosyphilis’ indicates that the nervous system has been affected; mercury is a known neurotoxin. This would indicate, therefore, that people claimed to suffer from ‘neurosyphilis’ had been misdiagnosed; their condition should have been labelled ‘mercury poisoning’ and they should not have been admitted to mental hospitals.

The French writer Stendhal, in his 1817 travelogue, Rome, Naples, and Florence, described

The death of Catharine was already known to him, and that knowledge, as might have been suspected, had destroyed his reason. I had feared nothing less; but now that I beheld the extinction of a mind the most luminous and penetrating that ever dignified the human form, my sensations were fraught with new and insupportable anguish.

There is no way to avoid a discussion of Thomas De Quincey at this point. Like Timothy Leary in the 1960s, De Quincey was able to convey the visionary power of what he experienced. For De Quincey this was a power imprisoned within the labyrinth of the poppy.

During much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, private detective agencies had filled the vacuum left by decentralized, underfunded, incompetent, and corrupt sheriff and police departments.