The Romans of the Decadence (detail), by Thomas Couture, 1847. Musée d'Orsay.

The Romans of the Decadence (detail), by Thomas Couture, 1847. Musée d’Orsay.

Intoxication

Volume VI, Number 1 | winter 2012

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Drunken Silenus supported by Satyrs by Anthony van Dyck.

Preamble

Alms for Oblivion

By Lewis H. Lapham

“One should always be drunk,” proclaimed poet Charles Baudelaire. But the question remains, drunk with what?

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Dionysos and his Thiasus, from the circle of the Antimenes Painter.

Fabled Powers

By Sven Birkerts

For an artist, a day of successful inspiration is also a day a systematic intoxication.

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Map

Indigenous Intoxicants

Getting high, around the world.

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Miscellany

Isolated from opium by the German chemist F. W. A. Sertürner around 1804, morphine (named after Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep and dreams) was used to treat opium addicts. Invented by Bayer Pharmaceuticals in 1898, heroin (derived from the Greek word for hero) was used to treat morphine addicts.

1822 | London

Consumer Report

Thomas De Quincey says opium is far more agreeable than alcohol.More

c. 1900 | Dublin

Darker Than the Swoon of Sin

James Joyce on the prowl in Dublin.More

1931 | Seattle

Tipped Off

Will you please have the Chinese bootlegger’s place raided?More

Charts & Graphs

Hangover remedies.

Morning-After Mixology

Hangover remedies.

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Portrait of English lyrical poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Portrait of French writer Stendhal.

Photograph of American humorist and author David Sedaris.

Photograph of American author Jacqueline Susann.

Black and white photograph of Sven Birkerts sitting in front of a bookshelf.

Black and white photograph of American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath.

I have sometimes thought that the laws ought not to punish those actions of evil which are committed when the senses are steeped in intoxication.

—Walt Whitman, 1842

Missing contributor image silhouette

Photograph of American novelist Jack London.

Theognis & Jack London

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