Fleur Jaeggy

Children who grow up in the country know about death; they can, in a manner of speaking, see their own bones out the window, in the frugal garden plots.

Thomas took his leave of youth, like a caliph takes leave of his rosebush.

The vestiges of his precocious erudition seemed to dissipate in the first light of dawn.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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