Suspiria de Profundis, Thomas De Quincey [cool books to read .txt] 📗

perfect rapture. It is in part through the sorrow of life, growing out of dark events, that this basis of awe and solemn darkness slowly accumulates. That I have illustrated. But, as life expands, it is more through the strife which besets us, strife from conflicting opinions, positions, passions, interests, that the funereal ground settles and deposits itself which sends upward the dark lustrous brilliancy through the jewel of life, else revealing a pale and superficial glitter. Either the human being must suffer and struggle, as the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow and without intellectual revelation. Memorial Suspiria

Heavens! when I look back to the sufferings which I have witnessed or heard of, I say, if life could throw open its long suites of chambers to our eyes from some station beforehand⁠—if from some secret stand we could look by anticipation along its vast corridors, and aside into the recesses opening upon them from either hand halls of tragedy or chambers of retribution⁠—simply in that small wing and no more of the great caravanserai which we ourselves shall haunt⁠—simply in that narrow tract of time, and no more, where we ourselves shall range, and confining our gaze to those and no others for whom personally we shall be interested⁠—What a recoil we should suffer of horror in our estimate of life! What if those sudden catastrophes, or those inexpiable afflictions, which have already descended upon the people within my own knowledge, and almost below my own eyes, all of them now gone past, and some long past, had been thrown open before me as a secret exhibition when first I and they stood within the vestibule of morning hopes⁠—when the calamities themselves had hardly begun to gather in their elements of possibility, and when some of the parties to them were as yet no more than infants! The past viewed not as the past, but by a spectator who steps back ten years deeper into the rear in order that he may regard it as a future⁠—the calamity of 1840 contemplated from the station of 1830⁠—the doom that rang the knell of happiness viewed from a point of time when as yet it was neither feared nor would even have been intelligible⁠—the name that killed in 1843 which in 1835, would have struck no vibration upon the heart⁠—the portrait that on the day of her Majesty’s coronation would have been admired by you with a pure disinterested admiration, but which, if seen today, would draw forth an involuntary groan: cases such as these are strangely moving for all who add deep though thoughtfulness to deep sensibility. As the hastiest of improvisations, accept, fair reader (for such reader it is that will chiefly feel such an invocation of the past), three or four illustrations from my own experience:⁠—

Who is this distinguished-looking young woman, with her eyes drooping, and the shadow of a dreadful shock yet fresh upon every feature? Who is the elderly lady, with her eyes flashing fire? Who is the downcast child of sixteen? What is that torn paper lying at their feet? Who is the writer? Whom does the paper concern? Ah! if she, if the central figure in the group⁠—twenty-two at the moment when she is revealed to us⁠—could, on her happy birthday at sweet seventeen, have seen the image of herself five years onwards just as we see it now, would she have prayed for life as for an absolute blessing? or would she not have prayed to be taken from the evil to come⁠—to be taken away one evening, at least, before this day’s sun arose? It is true, she still wears a look of gentle pride, and a relic of that noble smile which belongs to her that suffers an injury which many times over she would have died sooner than inflict. Womanly pride refuses itself before witnesses to the total prostration of the blow; but, for all that, you may see that she longs to be left alone, and that her tears will flow without restraint when she is so. This room is her pretty boudoir, in which, till tonight⁠—poor thing!⁠—she has been glad and happy. There stands her miniature conservatory, and there expands her miniature library; as we circumnavigators of literature are apt (you know) to regard all female libraries in the light of miniatures. None of these will ever rekindle a smile on her face; and there, beyond, is her music, which only of all that she possesses will now become dearer to her than ever; but, not, as once, to feed a self-mocked pensiveness, or to cheat a half-visionary sadness. She will be sad, indeed. But she is one of those that will suffer in silence. Nobody will ever detect her failing in any point of duty, or querulously seeking the support in others which she can find for herself in this solitary room. Droop she will not in the sight of men; and, for all beyond, nobody has any concern with that, except God. You shall hear what becomes of her before we take our departure; but now let me tell you what has happened.

In the main outline I am sure you guess already, without aid of mine; for we leaden-eyed men, in such cases, see nothing by comparison with you our quick-witted sisters. That haughty-looking lady, with the Roman cast of features, who must once have been strikingly handsome⁠—an Agrippina even yet in a favourable presentation⁠—is the younger lady’s aunt. She, it is rumoured, once sustained, in her younger days, some injury of that same cruel nature which has this day assailed her niece, and ever since she has worn an air of disdain, not altogether unsupported by real dignity, towards men. This aunt it was that tore the letter which lies upon the floor. It deserved to be torn; and yet she that had the best right to do so would not have torn it. That letter