Thomas’s day, and have degenerated into disgusting tendencies to vernal appearances. Indeed, so great an epicure am I in this matter that I cannot relish a winter night fully if it be much past St. ‘I can put up even with rain, provided it rains cats and dogs but something of the sort I must have, and if I have it not, I think myself in a manner ill-used for why am I called on to pay so heavily for winter, in coals and candles, and various privations that will occur even to gentlemen, if I am not to have the article good of its kind? No, a Canadian winter for my money, or a Russian one, where every man is but a co-proprietor with the north wind in the fee-simple of his own ears. In Confessions, he wants a winter that is fully characteristic of winter, as an extreme darkness to better contradict the summer months: The darkness also exists as a peripheral area where his senses are confused: the visions become ‘antiphonies in the choral service’ and a ‘chorus’, whereas when he wakes he will recall and record the visions in this text, and therefore have them captured only visually in the form of words on a page.Īnother temporary form of darkness that De Quincey appears to crave is seasonal, and he again craves that ‘antagonism’ to better understand or appreciate the light and warmth that summer will bring. In the opium-influenced dreaming, he forgets that the substance enabling him to see figures from his past is destructive, but once he awakes he cannot escape moral consequences. The restoration of these images, however, remind him even more sharply of the truth once he emerges from this ride in the darkness: he is ‘too pathetically sensible of that truth.’ The hallucinated re-introduction of time is signaled by him seeing a literal ‘mighty dial’ that invokes ‘the heavens and the heavenly host’, as though his moment of awakening reminds him of heavenly repercussions. The darkness of the night-time drive allows him to hallucinate visions of the past, offering him company and comfort. Then all at once we are arrived at Marlborough forest.’ And suddenly we upon the mail are pulled up by a mighty dial, sculptured with the hours, that mingle with the heavens and the heavenly host. Then comes a venerable crocodile, in a royal livery of scarlet and gold, with sixteen capes and the crocodile is driving four-in-hand from the box of the Bath mail. Then come both together, as in a chorus-roses and Fannies, Fannies and roses, without end, thick as blossoms in paradise. One after the other, like the antiphonies in the choral service, rise Fanny and the rose in June, then back again the rose in June and Fanny. Out of the darkness, if I happen to call back the image of Fanny, up rises suddenly from a gulf of forty years a rose in June or, if I think for an instant of the rose in June, up rises the heavenly face of Fanny. And often the restoration in vision of Fanny and the Bath road makes me too pathetically sensible of that truth. ‘If, therefore, the crocodile does not change, all things else undeniably do: even the shadow of the pyramids grows less. The English Mail-coach describes the twin effects of opium and nostalgia as De Quincey travels through the darkness on a mail coach, contrasting the temporal nature of his past experiences with the unchanging nature of the crocodile: As Virginia Woolf noted, however, hindsight is the only way to make sense of the past or your dreams: ‘it is only by gathering up and putting together these echoes and fragments that we arrive at the true nature of our experience.’ Tambling describes his 1856 revisions as ‘not only trying to fix the text, as Wordsworth had tried to do, but also attempting to demonstrate a unity within its digressions’: quoting De Quincey’s idea of a ‘veil’ between current consciousness and complete memories, Tambling interprets this attempt to demonstrate unity as inherently flawed, as finding meaning or knowing yourself in half-remembered dreams is futile. This hindsight is comparable to the manner in which he acted as his own editor, revising sections as he later considered fit, and is met in the text by a dwelling on the moment of ‘waking’ and shifting from one state into the other. De Quincey’s dreams and visions as described in his work function as a different world, which exists in places of temporary darkness, and his attempts to capture them must function outside of that world, in a well-lit space of recollection and translation onto paper.

Cloud nine meaning opium