Sublime

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.

Opium exhilarates the spirit; it can produce endlessly unraveling streamers of thought and rhapsodic speculation. The fifty years following De Quincey’s Confessions were to see a deep grappling with the impact of opium use on creativity, especially literary creativity.

ou can hear in the delaying rhythms of the opening sentence the influence of Marcel Proust and the digressive, paid-by-the-word style of Thomas De Quincey, whose essays Woolf had lately looked into for the first time

Opium, wrote Thomas De Quincey, is a powerful “counter agent … to the formidable curse of taedium vitae”—the tedium of life.

In 1888 British physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a now-famous short novel, The Sign of Four, in which his detective, the redoubtable Sherlock Holmes, comments on his use of cocaine: “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendingly stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a