These Possible Lives

When Keats speaks, he’s not sure that he’s the one talking. When he dreamed of bobbing in the turbine in Canto V of Dante’s Inferno, it was one of the great joys of his life

Sometimes he had the look in his eyes of a Delphic priestess on the hunt for visions

He observed that his head was too small for his broad shoulders, observed the intensity of his gaze that blazed like a flame when crossed but when calm glittered like a lake at dusk, and noted a cold lethargy.

He devoured books, he copied, translated sections, he became the scribe and secretary to his mind

His earliest brushes with melancholy were suddenly disrupted by outbursts of nervous laughter

He could barely read through one eye and yet was scrutinizing Allibone’s Dictionary of English Literature

Henry Fuseli ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams; Lamb spoke of “Lilliputian rabbits” when eating frog fricassee; and his sister Mary, wielding a knife, chased a little girl who was helping her in the kitchen and then stabbed her own mother through the heart; Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers; Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke. Coleridge, his head shrouded in a fog, read poetry badly and moaned gloomily. The dreams of Jean Paul, the crow that loved the storm, reverberated across the Lake District. This was TDQ’s Western Passage

The walls were hidden behind a dense fall of ivy; the façade was decorated with rose, jasmine, and honeysuckle

A pen-on-paper drawing of a London street, a clock, an empty hourglass — the slightest geomantic sketch reveals the place where TDQ was introduced to opium. A weak smile crept upon his lips and he almost laughed aloud, as in a memory. It was perhaps a morning in March (or was it the autumn?) in 1804. His lapidary voice, incurably affable, pronounced high praise of the potion. His entry into that world was like being a guest in the pages of a richly illustrated encyclopedia for children, where inanimate objects have the sturdiness of intoxication momentarily evanesced. Happiness teased him, then tilted, almost as if happiness were itself in a rage — or some graceful convulsion of nature.

Rapacity was the moneylender’s dominant frame of mind and although he was amicably disposed somewhere deep inside, or else gave the illusion of kindness, he didn’t allow himself to be constrained by the formalities of his station or by any proclivity to compassion.