Oníricas (16) Paraísos Artificiais I - Thomas de Quincey: Iniciação

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A citação é muito longa, mas deliciosa:

My road homewards lay through Oxford Street; and near "the stately Pantheon" (as Mr. Wordsworth has obliging called it) I saw a druggist's shop. The druggist (unconscious minister of celestial pleasures !), as if in sympathy with the rainy Sunday, looked dull and stupid, just as any mortal druggist might be expected to look on a rainy London Sunday; and when I asked for the tincture of opium, he gave it to me as any other man might do; and, furthermore, out of my shiling returned to me what seemed to be real copper halfpence, taken out of a real wooden drawer. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding all such indications of humanity, he has ever since figured in my mind as a beatific vision of an immortal druggist, sent down to earth on a special mission to myself. And it confirms me in this way of considering him that, when I next came up to London, I sought him near the stately Pantheon, and found him not; and thus to me, who knew not his name (if indeed, he had one), he seemed rather to have vanished from Oxford Street than to have flitted into any other locality, or (which some abominable man suggested) to have absconded from the rent. The reader may choose to think of him as, possibly, no more than a sublunary druggist; it may be so, but my faith is better. I believe him to have evanesced. So unwillingly would I connect any mortal remembrances with that hour, and place, and creature that first brought me acquainted with the celestial drug.
Arrived at my lodgings, it may be supoposed that I lost not a moment in taking the quantity prescribed. I was necessarily ignorant of the whole art and mistery of opium-taking; and what I took I took under every disadvantage. But I took it and in a hour, O heavens! what a revulsion! what a ressurrection, 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 ofthose positive effects which had opened before me, in the abyss of a divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea, for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness, about wich philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered; happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat-pocket; portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pin-bottle; and peace of mind could be sent down by the mail.

Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, (London, Penguin Books, 1997), pp.178-179.
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