"Some of these
rambles led me to
great distances: for an opium-eater is too happy to
observe the motion of
time. And sometimes in my
attempts to steer
homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my
eye on the
pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west
passage, instead of
circumnavigating all the
capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward
voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx's
riddles of
streets without
thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of
hackney-coachmen. I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the
first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and
doubted, whether they had yet been laid down in the
modern charts of
London. For all this, however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the
human face tyrannized over my
dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in
London came back and
haunted my
sleep, with the feeling of
perplexities moral or intellectual, that brought confusion to the
reason, or anguish and remorse to the conscience."
Thomas de Quincey,
Confessions of an English Opium Eater, London: Penguin, 1997, page 81
