Gwern

(I read the Project Gutenberg edition, which appears to be the first version which is shorter but generally said to be the better version. 36k words, 1-2 hours.)

One of the more famous drug memoirs, up there with Huxley’s The Doors of Perception in in

(I read the Project Gutenberg edition, which appears to be the first version which is shorter but generally said to be the better version. 36k words, 1-2 hours.)

One of the more famous drug memoirs, up there with Huxley’s The Doors of Perception in influence and how many people it has convinced to experiment. Most drugs that inspire prose tend to be psychedelics, and given the modern opiate epidemic, one is a little surprised to come across an opiate memoir, but de Quincey, when writing about opium, sounds remarkably like a modern drug writer, whose sentiments would fit right in at a 1960s California powwow, right down to his speculation that humans possess enormous powers of memory or thought which are suppressed in ordinary life but may reveal them under the proper (perhaps chemical) influence. I had heard the phrase ‘opium dream’ but somehow it had never dawned on me that this might be quite literal and smoking opium, like DMT, might cause dissociated states with engrossing hallucinations in addition to the euphoria and pain-killing aspects one expects from opiates.

The parts dealing with opium, however, are brief and could easily be excerpted in a review. The bulk of the work, which is hardly quoted, turns out to be a turgidly overwritten Romantic autobiography of de Quincey, where he professes to confess the troubles of his life and his innermost emotions; however, with de Quincey, author of “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts”, the more he confesses about his life, the more puzzling it becomes why he is boring us with his melodramatic autobiography which ultimately has so little to do with the humdrum entirely ordinary circumstances of his opium addiction, the less one believes him, and the more suspicion builds up that de Quincey is doing the exact opposite of confessing, he is instead an octopus camouflaging his real gothic self under a cloud of ink. One senses that de Quincey is engaged more in playing a role: a jaded hedonist, he wants to see and feel and provoke the extremes, and if that is not possible, then at least inflict an intimation of happy horrors or paranoid pleasures beyond normal human ken (which yet survives in Lovecraft):

I trust that it will prove not merely an interesting record, but in a considerable degree useful and instructive. In that hope it is that I have drawn it up; and that must be my apology for breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities. Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that “decent drapery” which time or indulgence to human frailty may have drawn over them…Connected with this sleep was a little incident which served, as hundreds of others did at that time, to convince me how easily a man who has never been in any great distress may pass through life without knowing, in his own person at least, anything of the possible goodness of the human heart-or, as I must add with a sigh, of its possible vileness. So thick a curtain of manners is drawn over the features and expression of men’s natures, that to the ordinary observer the two extremities, and the infinite field of varieties which lie between them, are all confounded; the vast and multitudinous compass of their several harmonies reduced to the meagre outline of differences expressed in the gamut or alphabet of elementary sounds…Jeremy Taylor conjectures that it may be as painful to be born as to die. I think it probable

Or Matthew Bevis:

But De Quincey didn’t merely reveal dangerous appetites; he was one of the first to think through what such appetites might be concealing. He virtually invented the categories of modern psychology - the OED credits him with bringing the words “evadable,” “pathologically,” and “subconscious” into the language…In a style that is somehow both loquacious and surreptitious, De Quincey is frequently drawn to enclosed spaces.. His beloved sister Elizabeth died (probably from meningitis) when he was six years old. In Suspiria De Profundis (1845), the astonishing sequel to Confessions, he writes that, the day after she died, he crept into the room where her corpse was laid out. Struck by the contrast between her beautiful, stiffening figure and “the tropical redundancy of life in summer,” he fell into a kind of daze:

When I returned to myself, there was a foot (or I fancied so) on the stairs. I was alarmed; for I believed that, if any body should detect me, means would be taken to prevent my coming again. Hastily, therefore, I kissed the lips that I should kiss no more, and slunk like a guilty thing with stealthy steps from the room. Thus perished the vision, loveliest amongst all the shows which earth has revealed to me; thus mutilated was the parting which should have lasted for ever; thus tainted with fear was the farewell sacred to love and grief, to perfect love and perfect grief.

Coming back to the room a few hours later, he found the door locked and himself “shut out for ever.”…Wilson doesn’t neglect her protagonist’s addiction, but she’s more interested in what Thomas Carlyle referred to as his “diseased acuteness” than in the acuteness of his disease. De Quincey diagnosed one illness as his “intolerable procrastination”; delays, deferrals, missed appointments and deadlines, all served to put off the future, but they also helped to create a future that was full of promise…De Quincey’s life and his writing are fueled by a sense that he abhors what he adores - and vice versa. He recalls that, when he was younger, he had “a perfect craze for being despised. I doted on it, and considered contempt a sort of luxury that I was in continual fear of losing.” This thought shines as much light on those who feel contempt as on those who suffer it. Before the visions of his opium-induced dreams, he admits, “I stood loathing and fascinated.” Loathing, for him, is itself a kind of fascination; to be disgusted is to be implicated. (He writes of how disgust may “fasten on” things, rather than, say, “recoil from” them.)…And like his disciple, the poet knew about the strangeness of guilt; in his preface to The Borderers, Wordsworth notes that “every time we plan a fresh accumulation of our guilt” - that is, every time we plan to do something that we know will later cause us to feel guilt - we involve ourselves in a “perturbed pleasure.” This sense of perturbed pleasure is what made Confessions such a shocking, gripping book for contemporary readers. The baroque black comedy of De Quincey’s style - what Poe described as “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque” - is founded on a portrait of the artist as someone who both colludes with and conspires against himself, someone who wears his predicament like an achievement. There’s a self-relishing archness hidden within De Quincey’s penchant for emergency, a sense that he knows his avoidances are the spur to his insights, as his opium dreams suggest…Early reviewers of the Confessions didn’t know whether to stare or grin. “It is not easy to say what the author intends by his book,” one remarked, sensing a subtle humor at work, provoking the reader to “laugh, without knowing, why or at what.”…Everywhere in the writing there lurks this sense of speculative arousal, the feeling that supping on horrors is a prelude to another kind of experiment. In a draft passage that didn’t make it into “The English Mail-Coach,” De Quincey explains that, along the journey, he fasted from everything but tea, “a trifle of opium,” and sin. And that sin is to be liberally interpreted; immediately after the near-fatal crash that he describes in such loving, lurid detail, he confesses that on reaching an inn, he had the baseness to talk only about cold beef and port wines. “There is not much to be said in defence of such conduct,” he admits, “but there is always something to be said in defence of any possible conduct.”

While unprepossessing, we should be charitable; as Borges says of Galland's Arabian Nights, "We, mere anachronistic readers of the twentieth century, perceive in these volumes the cloyingly sweet taste of the eighteenth century and not the evanescent oriental aroma that two hundred years ago was their innovation and their glory. No one is to blame for this missed encounter, least of all Galland."

Having gotten through the biography part, one finally gets the opium proper and since it is such a short book (really, an essay), the opium parts are surprisingly short for what is the first major description of opium and opium addiction in English. Some of the excerpts:

…Now Saturday night is the season for the chief, regular, and periodic return of rest of the poor; in this point the most hostile sects unite, and acknowledge a common link of brotherhood; almost all Christendom rests from its labours. It is a rest introductory to another rest, and divided by a whole day and two nights from the renewal of toil. On this account I feel always, on a Saturday night, as though I also were released from some yoke of labour, had some wages to receive, and some luxury of repose to enjoy. For the sake, therefore, of witnessing, upon as large a scale as possible, a spectacle with which my sympathy was so entire, I used often on Saturday nights, after I had taken opium, to wander forth, without much regarding the direction or the distance, to all the markets and other parts of London to which the poor resort of a Saturday night, for laying out their wages. Many a family party, consisting of a man, his wife, and sometimes one or two of his children, have I listened to, as they stood consulting on their ways and means, or the strength of their exchequer, or the price of household articles. Gradually I became familiar with their wishes, their difficulties, and their opinions. Sometimes there might be heard murmurs of discontent, but far oftener expressions on the countenance, or uttered in words, of patience, hope, and tranquillity. And taken generally, I must say that, in this point at least, the poor are more philosophic than the rich-that they show a more ready and cheerful submission to what they consider as irremediable evils or irreparable losses. Whenever I saw occasion, or could do it without appearing to be intrusive, I joined their parties, and gave my opinion upon the matter in discussion, which, if not always judicious, was always received indulgently. If wages were a little higher or expected to be so, or the quartern loaf a little lower, or it was reported that onions and butter were expected to fall, I was glad; yet, if the contrary were true, I drew from opium some means of consoling myself.

...The waters now changed their character-from translucent lakes shining like mirrors they now became seas and oceans. And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll through many months, promised an abiding torment; and in fact it never left me until the winding up of my case. Hitherto the human face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically nor with any special power of tormenting. But now that which I have called the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. Perhaps some part of my London life might be answerable for this. Be that as it may, now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear; the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces upturned to the heavens-faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries: my agitation was infinite; my mind tossed and surged with the ocean.

…No man can pretend that the wild, barbarous, and capricious superstitions of Africa, or of savage tribes elsewhere, affect him in the way that he is affected by the ancient, monumental, cruel, and elaborate religions of Indostan, &c. The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, histories, modes of faith, &c., is so impressive, that to me the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed. Even Englishmen, though not bred in any knowledge of such institutions, cannot but shudder at the mystic sublimity of castes that have flowed apart, and refused to mix, through such immemorial tracts of time; nor can any man fail to be awed by the names of the Ganges or the Euphrates. It contributes much to these feelings that southern Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life, the great officina gentium. Man is a weed in those regions. The vast empires also in which the enormous population of Asia has always been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings associated with all Oriental names or images. In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence and want of sympathy placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with lunatics or brute animals. All this, and much more than I can say or have time to say, the reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery and mythological tortures impressed upon me. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan. From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by parroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the summit or in secret rooms: I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my Oriental dreams, which always filled me with such amazement at the monstrous scenery that horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner or later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and left me not so much in terror as in hatred and abomination of what I saw. Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me into an oppression as of madness. Into these dreams only it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had been moral and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles; especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him, and (as was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and fascinated. And so often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams that many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear everything when I am sleeping), and instantly I awoke. It was broad noon, and my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside-come to show me their coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the transition from the damned crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and of infancy, that in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces.

…As a final specimen, I cite one of a different character, from 1820.

The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in dreams-a music of preparation and of awakening suspense, a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day-a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where-somehow, I knew not how-by some beings, I knew not whom-a battle, a strife, an agony, was conducting, was evolving like a great drama or piece of music, with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I, as is usual in dreams (where of necessity we make ourselves central to every movement), had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it, and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. “Deeper than ever plummet sounded,” I lay inactive. Then like a chorus the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake, some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms, hurryings to and fro, trepidations of innumerable fugitives - I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad, darkness and lights, tempest and human faces, and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed-and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then - everlasting farewells! And with a sigh, such as the caves of Hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death, the sound was reverberated - everlasting farewells! And again and yet again reverberated - everlasting farewells!

And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud - “I will sleep no more.”

A clearly written history of the decipherment of Linear B, structured as a 3-part autobiography with linguistic background interspersed chronologically as understanding of Linear B & Crete developed.

Fox’s mission, as she makes clear, is revisioni

A clearly written history of the decipherment of Linear B, structured as a 3-part autobiography with linguistic background interspersed chronologically as understanding of Linear B & Crete developed.

Fox’s mission, as she makes clear, is revisionism: drawing heavily on personal letters, she casts Alice Kober (incidentally, a graduate of Hunter High School & teacher there) as the Rosalind Franklin of Linear B, and castigating Michael Ventris. In this, she does not particularly succeed; she’s reduced to arguing that perhaps Kober could have and that despite her increasing age, strong hostility towards speculating about what language it was written in or trying to match up anything, and methodical approach, she might have succeeded where omnilingualist Ventris did a few years later. Which is not very persuasive since she doesn’t show such creative leaps in her earlier work, Ventris independently discovered some of the same things, and in any case, intellectual history does not typically assign credit based on what someone might’ve done if they had lived longer because that is unknowable and many people fail to live up to their initial promise as they regress to mediocrity or just go off on fatally unproductive tangents (eg Isaac Newton or Einstein). Fox’s hostile approach to Ventris left a bad taste in my mouth, as Ventris does not appear to have had an easy life whatever his ‘privilege’ and there’s an unpleasant emphasis on how he wasn’t credentialed like Kober (apparently it’s not cool to be the underdog outsider if you’re a white male).

Actually, the impression I strongly got was that long duration from discovery to Linear B’s decipherment reflects not so much Linear B being extraordinarily difficult or bad luck by Kober, so much as as the severe damage done to research progress by the refusal to share data by almost all parties involved beginning with Arthur Evans (an academic sin which we remain all too familiar with), continuing with Blegen, and through to Kober - by my counting, once more than 200 inscriptions became even semi-publicly available in the mid-1940s, the solution followed in 1952 after not even a decade! As is not that surprising in retrospect, inasmuch as the language turned out to be the obvious one and lots of proper names survived into Greek sources and so were available for Rosetta Stone-style comparison. Kober’s exhaustive cross-classifications on 180000 index cards, which took so many years, would have been trivial with a full corpus and a 1950s-era computer, or even just an electromechanical IBM card machine (which could do sorting, cross-tabulation, and other summaries); it leaves one with a sense of pity and disgust to see so much effort expended on such a extraordinarily inefficient way of going about things when waiting a decade or two would have reduced a task from requiring multiple years of labor to weeks or months. While granted Kober didn’t have the budget for renting such equipment, that doesn’t necessarily justify such an approach. Sometimes the time is just not ripe for attacking a problem and one should have the good judgment to work on something else for a while instead of childishly insisting on working on that one thing, which often helps with the original thing as well (perhaps Kober would’ve gotten that tenured position if she had something, anything else to show published; I’ve noted in my other reviews that during the post-WWII hyper-expansion of America, getting tenure at a university was apparently as easy as falling off a log, even for women, so Kober’s failure with Penn is all the more striking). So a sobering double lesson for modern researchers: data hoarding can be extraordinarily harmful and is probably not stigmatized or penalized nearly enough, and stubbornness about a topic to research can be as much a fault as stubbornness about the details of a theory about that topic.

One of the things I dread in a work like this is an author who is in a hurry to cover up and hide all the technical details and dreads that her audience is too dumb, ignorant, and impatient to reach any genuine understanding and settles for ‘lies to children’. She seems to avoid this trap and I felt, at least as a non-classicist and non-linguist, that I got an intelligible and reasonably accurate understanding of the intellectual puzzle and accomplishment of the decipherers.

But was Linear B really worth reading about? The decipherment of hieroglyphics, of course, unlocked an extraordinary array of Egyptian riches from the baroque mythology, endless ancient Egyptian history, and many interesting magical, religious, and everyday letters and documents; there is no question as a layperson that you are interested in what hieroglyphics have to say even more than in how they say it and how they were unlocked. Mesopotamian clay documents are often boring, but so many survive and give us things like Gilgamesh that there too the results seem worth learning about, even the commercial ones which can build up a whole market economy before our eyes. With Linear B… the deciphering turns out to be the most interesting part. The documents are boring and the world depicted in the administrivia is about exactly what you would expect from reading about the palace, a totalitarian agricultural economy, and are a disappointment. A few enigmatic names and allusions are a poor catch. (It is just as well Nero didn’t see the true translation of the tablets discovered during his reign, because he would have been greatly disappointed to see nothing at all on the level of the memoirs of a participant in the Trojan War.) With Linear B, the journey is more interesting than the destination, which makes the account somewhat sterile. (In contrast, while I haven’t been able to finish reading Empires of the Plains, Henry Rawlinson had an extraordinarily interesting life and provided the gateway to the ancient Mesopotamian world.)

18 short stories typically with an ironic SF or fantasy tinge and heavy reliance on twist endings (more like Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives or Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others than The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq). As w

18 short stories typically with an ironic SF or fantasy tinge and heavy reliance on twist endings (more like Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives or Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others than The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq). As with most anthologies, the quality is uneven.

Decent:

Poor: