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Thomas de Quincey: Confessions of an English Opium Eater 1821.
The writings of de Quincey were re-discovered by my generation in the (you guessed!) 1960s, when we read Huxley's Doors of Perception (1954 - Huxley's exploration of hallucinogenic drugs), Claude Farrere's Black Opium (1931 - a wonderful collection of opium-vision stories), and of course, the writings of William S. Burroughs (Junky 1953) and Tim Leary. (The Politics of Ecstacy 1970). Reviews and excerpts from these and other seminal volumes - such as Huysmans' A Rebours (1884), Crowley's The Book of the Law (1904), Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous (1949) and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) seemed to feature regularly in my own reading and in the counter culture periodicals OZ and IT. This of course coincided with our own explorations of marijuana, hashish, nitrous oxide and amphetamine sulphate (etc), providing the intellectual and literary context for this activity. Much of this happenstance reading, perhaps especially of Ouspensky, seemed to go hand-in- hand with the discovery of the graphic works of Mauritz Escher; the contemporary art of Abdul Mati Klarwein (cf the cover art for Miles Davis: Bitches Brew (1970), and other exciting stuff that lay way outside the canon of Modernist art history.
“Arrived at my lodgings, it may be supposed that I lost not a minute in taking the quantity prescribed. I was necessarily ignorant of the whole art and mystery of opium-taking: and what I took, I took under every disadvantage. But I took it: - and in an hour, oh! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes: - this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me - in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea - for all human woes: here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered: happiness that might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket: portable ecstacies might be had corked-up in a pint bottle: and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by a mail coach.” (de Quincey: Confessions 1821)
This precedential account of an aspect of modern life and a harbinger of Romanticism, emerged in the early 19th century as Laudanum, the tincture of opium in alcohol, became widely and cheaply available, and so became a popular self-medicant, much appreciated for its pain-killing and euphoric side effect. So with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who used opium to relieve arthritis, and for whom it seems to have had a creative, visionary, effect (see Kubla Khan - written earlier but first published in 1816). It was this psychedelic - or mind-expanding - effect that fascinated us art-students, as well as the physical enhancement of the senses. My favourite opium-related book I found in a bookshop in Portsmouth in the mid 1960s: