O, Confessions of an Opium Eater

De Quincey begins his "Confesssions of an Opium Eater" with lines like grappling hooks, which forced me to read on. I quickly ran my eyes from left to right, left to right, like a typewriter resetting its ribbon repeatedly, and I remember the moment at which they stopped. De Quincey writes, "But I took it: -- and in an hour, oh! Heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes: -- this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me -- in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea - a [pharmakon nepenthez] for all human woes..." I pictured him on his knees, the opium allowing his eyes to feel open for the first time with its painful bliss. His words allowed me to see him; the feelings inside him swelling from their deepest point and shooting forward in lines throughout his body. Previous to this description, he goes into great depth about the druggist. In his mind an ephemeral being, sent to Earth solely for the purpose of serving him. When De Quincey wrote, "...returned me what seemed to be real copper halfpence, taken out of a real wooden drawer," it brought about such beautiful imagery. This prose reads like poetry throughout. His writing style and words seem to be, themselves, eternally drugged. The "cloudless serenity" of which he speaks, battled with the men "disguised by sobriety," and the brutish drunks all give way into his clear window of logic in recounting his prior actions, feelings, and descriptions of this drug. There is, however, the ever-present and lurking reminder that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. This realization comes later in the piece. It was interesting to find that opium led him to be intellectually stimulated, to be seen as a "visionary" and to go about the streets of London at night, inspired. His opium-induced self seems to be the true definition of a Romantic. Opium itself is derived from nature - poppies - and that is where Romantic poets and writers claim to always find true happiness and inspiration. His outings to the Opera-house sent music of all sorts (the singer's soul, tyrannic violins, crowds of people) swirling around him blissfully, and all the more enjoyed by his 'debauch of opium.' He seemed sort of like Hunter S. Thompson, taking drugs and going out into the sufferings of the sober or the drunk; but rarely is anyone else in public on hard drugs, and if they are, they are all too out of sorts to recognize their bretheren. His later realizations fall on solitude and reflection; another definition akin to the true Romantic. De Quincey proves full circle to have experienced the tragically beautiful life of a romantic writer.