Word: quincey
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Thomas De Quincey's mother, who ought to have known one when she saw one, called the infant Thomas Babington Macaulay a "baby genius." From the age of three, "Clever Tom" was a compulsive reader whose idea of a wild childhood game was to act out Homer, reserving for himself the role of Achilles. At six, the future author of the five-volume History of England was at work on a compendium of world history...
...were inspired by it; certainly their feeling of limitless dread, of imprisonment by infinite space, pertains to opium experience. Hence Piranesi's interest for some 19th century writers who, like Coleridge and Baudelaire, were opium addicts. "With the same power of endless growth and reproduction," wrote Thomas de Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium Eater, "did my architecture proceed in dreams." Today, for an audience soaked in cheap psychedelia, Piranesi's prisons are a reminder that only complex and fastidious minds have trips that are worth recalling. They do not represent a flash of hallucination, but rather...
...Ricks talks about despair, ennui and neurosis, Mellen about the contradictions between peyote eating and the Protestant ethic. But neither really faces the fact that ingesting psychedelics is different from taking heroin or watching television. S. Clarke Woodroe goes a bit deeper. Discussing the drug experiences of Baudelaire, de Quincey and other writers, he makes some interesting points about the relation between drugs, megalomaniac delusions, and intellectual creativity...
...handouts from a rich homosexual. He goes partying with a congeries of unlovable eccentrics, such as the frail and balding Gabriel Fantl, who was "reputed to have more women by the month than any known man,'' elderly Effie, who had three ghosts (a poltergeist, Thomas De Quincey, and a half-man, half-beast), and Flora Massingham, "as fat and pink as a pig at Christmas," who took him to see a magic show where a young woman was really sawed in half. "I said: 'Well, what's the explanation?' Flora Massingham said: 'there...
More gripping than symphonies and sausages is sex. Through Nunne, Gerard meets Gertrude Quincey, a svelte but fortyish virgin. Her panting, 17-year-old niece Caroline goes to bed with Gerard first, but auntie soon follows. Author Wilson's handling of the love scenes may be summed up in one cozy Briticism ("Her mouth tasted like warm tea"). Some of Nunne's other friends are very different cups of tea, notably, a red-mopped painter named Oliver Glasp, who dilly-Dalis between nudes and Crucifixions. Wilson's defense of such characters is clearly Terence's "Nothing...