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Jan. 26th, 2007 06:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionDe Quincey's essay on Shelley is bad but very moving. His Shelley believes in God but hates him, rather in Ahab's style; but is never uncharitable to his fellow humans, and in general displays all terrestrial Christian virtues. De Quincey plays with the idea, in a tone of awe, of God unleashing Job levels of wrath at Shelley across his lifetime, because of his defiance, and, the tortures failing or growing tedious, just hopping onto and murdering him, a la Judge Holden.
De Quincey was an addict, and most addicts seem to need God, or seem to need to feel they do. I guess it would take that level of need to be able to proceed so innocently into the maelstrom of religious illogic? Your faith would have to be something totally glassed off from reason to not notice that if someone is merely mistaken (as De Quincey defiantly insists Shelley was, and never sinful or malicious) and God punishes them for this, then God is evil, and Shelley therefore right to defy him.
Maybe the addict requires God's power--presumably God's forgiving aspect can be as unhelpful as that of one's family. One invokes the strongest available counterforce against one's cravings.
Probably, though, De Quincey sees his own sufferings as having been parallel to Shelley's, and God's wrath not as what enabled him to fight opium and drink but as the miseries they brought on him when he stepped out of line, the demon they set loose on the whole body of his life and potential. Shelley, though, had not deserved them. Shelley had drawn them onto himself by attacking God in the name of De Quincey and all us other hostages.
What kind of tribute could you write to such a man, while still a hostage? Probably this.
De Quincey was an addict, and most addicts seem to need God, or seem to need to feel they do. I guess it would take that level of need to be able to proceed so innocently into the maelstrom of religious illogic? Your faith would have to be something totally glassed off from reason to not notice that if someone is merely mistaken (as De Quincey defiantly insists Shelley was, and never sinful or malicious) and God punishes them for this, then God is evil, and Shelley therefore right to defy him.
Maybe the addict requires God's power--presumably God's forgiving aspect can be as unhelpful as that of one's family. One invokes the strongest available counterforce against one's cravings.
Probably, though, De Quincey sees his own sufferings as having been parallel to Shelley's, and God's wrath not as what enabled him to fight opium and drink but as the miseries they brought on him when he stepped out of line, the demon they set loose on the whole body of his life and potential. Shelley, though, had not deserved them. Shelley had drawn them onto himself by attacking God in the name of De Quincey and all us other hostages.
What kind of tribute could you write to such a man, while still a hostage? Probably this.
