Text based life-form. Wry, Misanthrope, Reading (lots), Long Drives, Baseball, Baking, Hiking. I read multitudes.
Minneapolis MN, Hayward WI
Joined September 2008
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Last night finished De Quincey’s marvelous MEMOIRS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. He follows a section on the pleasures of the drug with an account of the struggle to wean himself from its dominion, which he refers to as an “Iliad of woes” — truly a siege upon his own mind and body.
“The dread book of account of which the scriptures speak is, in fact, the mind of each individual,” postulates De Quincey in OPIUM-EATER. “There is no such thing as ultimate forgetting . . . [it] remains forever just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day.”
“I confess it, as a besetting infirmity of mine, that I am too much a Eudaemonist; I hanker too much after a state of happiness, both for myself and others; I cannot face misery, whether my own or not.” Thomas De Quincey, MEMOIRS OF AN OPIUM-EATER
“The druggist (unconscious minister of celestial pleasures),” recalls De Quincey of his first purchase of opium from an unprepossessing Oxford St. shopkeeper, “has ever since figured in my mind as a beatific vision sent down to earth on a special mission to myself.” OPIUM-EATER
In De Quincey’s notorious MEMOIRS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, a solicitous friend suggests opium as remedy for a crippling toothache, but the young Thomas quickly finds it has much wider curative powers: “Here was a panacea for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness.”
The clockwork of vague guilt and anxiety in Simenon’s THE VENICE TRAIN: “He had gotten into the habit of thinking things over. It had become a mania. He did it without realizing it, as though he had a little mechanism in his head that was always ticking, even at night.”
“That morning he made a momentous discovery that affected him more than he realized . . . . he did not have a single place where he could hide an object.” In Simenon’s THE VENICE TRAIN, every impulse is thwarted by bourgeois domesticity. “He was a prisoner of his household.”
“Calmar did not like being out of his element, and he had been feeling out of his element, without any roots or anything solid to lean on, for fifteen years.” Simenon, THE VENICE TRAIN
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Reading Ahmed’s “Crossing the Red Line.” Six hundred thousand children! Six HUNDRED thousand children!! My god.
Finished Balzac’s novella AT THE SIGN OF THE CAT AND RACKET, of a modest beauty whose misfortune is to attract the admiration of a slumming noble. Like the absurd tennis-playing cat of the title, their folié crosses what amounts to a species barrier between bourgeoise and artist.
In Balzac, the perils of loving intellectuals: “We women can admire a man of genius and enjoy them as we would a play, but live with them? Never! Why! it is like taking pleasure in going behind the scenes at the opera instead of enjoying its brilliant illusions from a box.”
Continuing my slow reread of Balzac’s works with his 1830 novella AT THE SIGN OF THE CAT AND RACKET, which immediately plunges one into the labyrinth of pre-Haussmann Paris. My 1898 copy has a frontis. that nicely depicts the formidable tennis-playing cat of the title.
“In the middle of the delicately carved beam was a picture of a cat playing at ball . . . in his front paws was a racket big as himself and he was standing on his hind legs to aim at an enormous ball returned to him by a gentleman in an embroidered coat.” Balzac, CAT AND RACKET