Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey (top non fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

gave the author no strength to act upon it.  However, a crisis arrived for the author’s life, and a crisis for other objects still dearer to him—and which will always be far dearer to him than his life, even now that it is again a happy one.  I saw that I must die if I continued the opium.  I determined, therefore, if that should be required, to die in throwing it off.  How much I was at that time taking I cannot say, for the opium which I used had been purchased for me by a friend, who afterwards refused to let me pay him; so that I could not ascertain even what quantity I had used within the year.  I apprehend, however, that I took it very irregularly, and that I varied from about fifty or sixty grains to 150 a day.  My first task was to reduce it to forty, to thirty, and as fast as I could to twelve grains.

I triumphed.  But think not, reader, that therefore my sufferings were ended, nor think of me as of one sitting in a dejected state.  Think of me as one, even when four months had passed, still agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, shattered, and much perhaps in the situation of him who has been racked, as I collect the torments of that state from the affecting account of them left by a most innocent sufferer {20} of the times of James I.  Meantime, I derived no benefit from any medicine, except one prescribed to me by an Edinburgh surgeon of great eminence, viz., ammoniated tincture of valerian.  Medical account, therefore, of my emancipation I have not much to give, and even that little, as managed by a man so ignorant of medicine as myself, would probably tend only to mislead.  At all events, it would be misplaced in this situation.  The moral of the narrative is addressed to the opium-eater, and therefore of necessity limited in its application.  If he is taught to fear and tremble, enough has been effected.  But he may say that the issue of my case is at least a proof that opium, after a seventeen years’ use and an eight years’ abuse of its powers, may still be renounced, and that he may chance to bring to the task greater energy than I did, or that with a stronger constitution than mine he may obtain the same results with less.  This may be true.  I would not presume to measure the efforts of other men by my own.  I heartily wish him more energy.  I wish him the same success.  Nevertheless, I had motives external to myself which he may unfortunately want, and these supplied me with conscientious supports which mere personal interests might fail to supply to a mind debilitated by opium.

Jeremy Taylor conjectures that it may be as painful to be born as to die.  I think it probable; and during the whole period of diminishing the opium I had the torments of a man passing out of one mode of existence into another.  The issue was not death, but a sort of physical regeneration; and I may add that ever since, at intervals, I have had a restoration of more than youthful spirits, though under the pressure of difficulties which in a less happy state of mind I should have called misfortunes.

One memorial of my former condition still remains—my dreams are not yet perfectly calm; the dread swell and agitation of the storm have not wholly subsided; the legions that encamped in them are drawing off, but not all departed; my sleep is still tumultuous, and, like the gates of Paradise to our first parents when looking back from afar, it is still (in the tremendous line of Milton)

With dreadful faces throng’d, and fiery arms.

APPENDIX

From the “London Magazine” for December 1822.

The interest excited by the two papers bearing this title, in our numbers for September and October 1821, will have kept our promise of a Third Part fresh in the remembrance of our readers.  That we are still unable to fulfil our engagement in its original meaning will, we, are sure, be matter of regret to them as to ourselves, especially when they have perused the following affecting narrative.  It was composed for the purpose of being appended to an edition of the Confessions in a separate volume, which is already before the public, and we have reprinted it entire, that our subscribers may be in possession of the whole of this extraordinary history.

* * * * *

The proprietors of this little work having determined on reprinting it, some explanation seems called for, to account for the non-appearance of a third part promised in the London Magazine of December last; and the more so because the proprietors, under whose guarantee that promise was issued, might otherwise be implicated in the blame—little or much—attached to its non-fulfilment.  This blame, in mere justice, the author takes wholly upon himself.  What may be the exact amount of the guilt which he thus appropriates is a very dark question to his own judgment, and not much illuminated by any of the masters in casuistry whom he has consulted on the occasion.  On the one hand it seems generally agreed that a promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made; for which reason it is that we see many persons break promises without scruple that are made to a whole nation, who keep their faith religiously in all private engagements, breaches of promise towards the stronger party being committed at a man’s own peril; on the other hand, the only parties interested in the promises of an author are his readers, and these it is a point of modesty in any author to believe as few as possible—or perhaps only one, in which case any promise imposes a sanctity of moral obligation which it is shocking to think of.  Casuistry dismissed, however, the author throws himself on the indulgent consideration of all who may conceive themselves aggrieved by his delay, in the following account of his own condition from the end of last year, when the engagement was made, up nearly to the present time.  For any purpose of self-excuse it might be sufficient to say that intolerable bodily suffering had totally disabled him for almost any exertion of mind, more especially for such as demands and presupposes a pleasurable and genial state of feeling; but, as a case that may by possibility contribute a trifle to the medical history of opium, in a further stage of its action than can often have been brought under the notice of professional men, he has judged that it might be acceptable to some readers to have it described more at length.  Fiat experimentum in corpore vili is a just rule where there is any reasonable presumption of benefit to arise on a large scale.  What the benefit may be will admit of a doubt, but there can be none as to the value of the body; for a more worthless body than his own the author is free to confess cannot be.  It is his pride to believe that it is the very ideal of a base, crazy, despicable human system, that hardly ever could have been meant to be seaworthy for two days under the ordinary storms and wear and tear of life; and indeed, if that were the creditable way of disposing of human bodies, he must own that he should almost be ashamed to bequeath his wretched structure to any respectable dog.  But now to the case, which, for the sake of avoiding the constant recurrence of a cumbersome periphrasis, the author will take the liberty of giving in the first person.

* * * * *

Those who have read the Confessions will have closed them with the impression that I had wholly renounced the use of opium.  This impression I meant to convey, and that for two reasons: first, because the very act of deliberately recording such a state of suffering necessarily presumes in the recorder a power of surveying his own case as a cool spectator, and a degree of spirits for adequately describing it which it would be inconsistent to suppose in any person speaking from the station of an actual sufferer; secondly, because I, who had descended from so large a quantity as 8,000 drops to so small a one (comparatively speaking) as a quantity ranging between 300 and 160 drops, might well suppose that the victory was in effect achieved.  In suffering my readers, therefore, to think of me as of a reformed opium-eater, I left no impression but what I shared myself; and, as may be seen, even this impression was left to be collected from the general tone of the conclusion, and not from any specific words, which are in no instance at variance with the literal truth.  In no long time after that paper was written I became sensible that the effort which remained would cost me far more energy than I had anticipated, and the necessity for making it was more apparent every month.  In particular I became aware of an increasing callousness or defect of sensibility in the stomach, and this I imagined might imply a scirrhous state of that organ, either formed or forming.  An eminent physician, to whose kindness I was at that time deeply indebted, informed me that such a termination of my case was not impossible, though likely to be forestalled by a different termination in the event of my continuing the use of opium.  Opium therefore I resolved wholly to abjure as soon as I should find myself at liberty to bend my undivided attention and energy to this purpose.  It was not, however, until the 24th of June last that any tolerable concurrence of facilities for such an attempt arrived.  On that day I began my experiment, having previously settled in my own mind that I would not flinch, but would “stand up to the scratch” under any possible “punishment.”  I must premise that about 170 or 180 drops had been my ordinary allowance for many months; occasionally I had run up as high as 500, and once nearly to 700; in repeated preludes to my final experiment I had also gone as low as 100 drops; but had found it impossible to stand it beyond the fourth day—which, by the way, I have always found more difficult to get over than any of the preceding three.  I went off under easy sail—130 drops a day for three days; on the fourth I plunged at once to 80.  The misery which I now suffered “took the conceit” out of me at once, and for about a month I continued off and on about this mark; then I sunk to 60, and the next day to—none at all.  This was the first day for nearly ten years that I had existed without opium.  I persevered in my abstinence for ninety hours; i.e., upwards of half a week.  Then I took—ask me not how much; say, ye severest, what would ye have done?  Then I abstained again—then took about 25 drops then abstained; and so on.

Meantime the symptoms which attended my case for the first six weeks of my experiment were these: enormous irritability and excitement of the whole system; the stomach in particular restored to a full feeling of vitality and sensibility, but often in great pain; unceasing restlessness night and day; sleep—I scarcely knew what it was; three hours out of the twenty-four was the utmost I had, and that so agitated and shallow that I heard every sound that was near me.  Lower jaw constantly swelling, mouth ulcerated, and many other distressing symptoms that would be tedious to repeat; amongst which, however, I must mention one, because it had never failed to accompany any attempt to renounce opium—viz., violent sternutation.  This now became exceedingly troublesome, sometimes lasting for two hours at once, and recurring at least twice or three times a day.  I was not much surprised at this on recollecting what I had somewhere heard or read, that the membrane which lines the nostrils is a prolongation of that which lines the stomach; whence, I believe, are explained the inflammatory appearances about the nostrils of dram drinkers.  The sudden restoration of its original sensibility to the stomach expressed itself, I suppose, in this way.  It is remarkable also that during the whole period of years through which I had taken opium I had never once caught cold (as the phrase is), nor even the slightest cough.  But now a violent cold attacked me, and a cough soon after.  In an unfinished fragment of a letter begun about this time to—I find these words: “You ask me to write the—Do you know Beaumont and Fletcher’s play of “Thierry and Theodore”?  There you will see my case as to sleep; nor is it much of an exaggeration in other features.  I protest to you that I have