Among many reflections in Thomas de Quincey’s essay “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant,” the reader is offered a glimpse at the philosopher’s bedtime routine. Kant had a strict habit, it turns out, of reading by candlelight until ten o’clock then removing his mind from exertion for one golden half hour, sure that a mind laden with study would be prone to wakefulness. So he simply sat. Until, having removed his mind for the requisite time, he would undress, lie down, and wrap himself in a blanket—cotton in summer, wool in autumn, then, as the air cooled, both of these together. Once Königsberg was in the fullest grip of winter, frost felling ancient oaks and small hills of snow on every pitched rooftop, he’d sensibly switch to eiderdown or, to hit the nail on the head, to a blanket of eiderdown ingeniously stuffed, in its upper third, with wool instead of feathers (a blanket, then, both padded and stuffed), with which he’d enfold his body—nesting more than covering, we’re told. Here’s how: first, he’d sit on the side of the bed and with an agile motion vault obliquely into his lair; next, he drew one corner of the bedclothes under his left shoulder and, passing it below his back, brought it round so as to rest under his right shoulder; fourthly, by a particular tour d’addresse, he operated on the opposite corner in similar fashion, finally contriving to roll the blanket around his entire person. How pleasing it is to imagine Immanuel Kant thus enswathed (self-involved as a silkworm) as Thomas de Quincey stands close at hand, snuffing the candle or checking that the curtains are shut against the cold, and taking notes, mentally if not literally—noting, for example, how the author of Critique of Pure Reason, once nested, would often exclaim, “Is it possible to conceive of a human being with more perfect health than myself?” Yet, you would be wrong in imagining things this way. For the truth of “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant” by Thomas de Quincey is that not much of it is, in fact, by Thomas de Quincey. The truth, which hides not behind lies but behind de Quincey’s curious relationship to quotation and citation, is that this intimate description of Kant’s bedtime routine comes from Ehregott Andreas Wasianski’s 1804 Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren, which de Quincey translated and annotated in such a way as to leave the reader with the impression that the words and experiences were de Quincey’s very own. And so it is Wasianski, not de Quincey, snuffing Kant’s candle, Wasianski, not de Quincey, with the presence of mind to inform us that when hosting a party, rather than keep a bottle of decanted wine with a servant, Kant, anacreontically, preferred to keep one at the elbow of every single guest. Who Wasianski was is not of great importance (a friend, a priest, a musical inventor) because it is de Quincey whom we think of as we read. “It is Thomas de Quincey that history remembers,” I say to my companion sitting opposite on this bullet train, as we look out at the landscape whizzing by.
Looking at a rainbow shooting straight up from a field, I recall an interview with a French writer who, when asked what made his books funny, answered, “Work, work, work.” “Yet, I can’t help thinking,” I tell my new friend, “that the humor I find in ‘The Last Days of Immanuel Kant’ is at least partially accidental.” Or perhaps that’s me eating straight out of its hand? Take the section in which de Quincey explains that Kant is not popular here and now (the here and now in question being nineteenth-century England) because he cannot be, and he cannot be because he wrote in German, and because of what, in German, he wrote. He wrote: All of the elements of the manifold of i (where i is some arbitrary intuition) are such that H is or can become conscious, in thought, that all of those elements, taken together, are accompanied by the I think. I think, announces de Quincey—in the middle of a tremendously long footnote printed in an exceptionally tiny font, yet offered with total conviction, as though these are the final words on a man and his body of work—popular the Transcendental Philosophy can never be.
Thus, we have an essay written and not written by Thomas De Quincey, about a philosopher whose philosophy, the essay’s writer-slash-not-writer tells us, cannot be liked, or not liked by many, and yet, he goes on, any thinking person must be interested in Kant the man. A great man, he argues, though in an unpopular path, will always be an object of liberal curiosity—and, indeed, there is ample evidence with which to back him up! From Diogenes Laërtius to our very own here and now, we seem to long to know just how the great man eats his breakfast (in Kant’s case, oatmeal, promptly at five each morning), how he takes his exercise (a walk after dinner each night, alone, so as not to be bothered with conversation, talk forcing one to take in air through the mouth, whereas Kant preferred to take in air through his nostrils, ensuring the air reaching his lungs would arrive in a state of less rawness, especially in winter, the nose being an instrument of warming), how he sleeps (enswathed!), and above all how he dies. Like all great men, Kant died without any sweat. Only his eye was rigid, writes Wasianski, writes de Quincey, and his face and lips became discolored by a cadaverous pallor—and that was all. No crying or pleading, no vomit or piss. Unlike the rest of us, a great man looks out at the abyss and simply exhales. Or so we are told. And so we can hold it in our hands. This small old book in bright green leather—The Works of Thomas de Quincey: Last Days of Immanuel Kant and Other Writings—and I hold it up to show my neighbor as our train plunges into the dark.
“De Quincey,” I say as we reengage the daylight, “is best known as an opium eater. In fact, we are told, he was a visionary at six.” His earliest memories were dreams. When his sister Jane died aged three, the younger Thomas assumed she’d pop back with the spring rains, like a bulb. When his sister Elizabeth died aged nine, he stood beside her corpse and fell into a trance. Thus Thomas took leave of his youth: a school, a tutor, a tutor, a school. Some called him weak and effeminate, others gifted and premature. Throughout his life, de Quincey would be troubled by pain in his guts. A brilliant student, fluent in Greek, in 1802 he ran away from Manchester Grammar, tossing his trunk down the stairs one moonless night. Of course, the lives of the Romantics were filled with desperate flights, but de Quincey was perhaps the most adept at sleeping in actual fields and trudging through mountainous rain. A smallish teenager, he calls the sunset pompous. He watches the girls in bonnets. Then he is found and disappears again to befriend a virgin whore in London’s soggy streets. At last he arrives at Worcester College, Oxford—but he’ll run away from that school, too, calling it Ancient Mother.
“You might,” I say, seeing a skeptical sort of spasm pass over my companion’s face, “be inclined to think I inject so much moisture into this story because of the drops now pelting our window, and so be more likely to doubt the truth of what I say. But the fact is that the first forty years of the nineteenth century saw excessive rainfall in England. Truly, there were those who called it ‘outstandingly wet.’”
“Interestingly,” I continue as the horn blasts and we barrel past a cow, “for all the care with which de Quincey recounts Wasianski’s account of Kant, the great man to whom he was truly devoted was William Wordsworth.” He called himself, at seventeen, zealously attached, then went to live for a decade in Mr. Wordsworth’s beloved Dove Cottage, its tangle of ivy and scallop-pink walls, where he irritated the elder poet’s more fastidious nature. It’s such a shame to meet the ones we worship. De Quincey would later advise: “Never describe Wordsworth as equal in pride to Lucifer: no; but, if you have occasion to write a life of Lucifer, set down that by possibility, in respect to pride, he might be some type of Wordsworth.”
Eventually, he settled in Edinburgh with his wife and chowder of kids. As regards the de Quincey children: three boys died, one gruesomely, one in China, and Sara Coleridge accused the father of neglecting them all and worse. Yet, he was silver-tongued, even or especially in his insults. That no one in England read Kant was a sign, he was sure, of the nation’s intellectual emasculation; Goethe was no good; Coleridge was a thief. Incendiary was de Quincey, always catching his hair on fire, his haystacks of papers, too. When he died at seventy-four, a semblance of youth came over his face. He looked, we’re told, a boy of fourteen. “Thank you,” he said, then simply expired. They called him a gracious corpse.
Now, from the window of this speeding train, I see hill after hill after hill and all their grasses blurring. Incidentally, the writer I’ve been most recently reading on de Quincey—in an essay called “Thomas de Quincey”—was also the translator into Italian of Gli ultimi giorni di Immanuel Kant. “And so,” I tell my drowsy companion, for indeed it seems this train will never stop its oscillation, never meet an ocean, never approach a mountain it can’t pass, “the writers begin to blur like the grassy hills!” That writer’s name is Fleur Jaeggy, born in Switzerland and educated by nuns, there were horses and she rode them speaking Italian, German, and French. Later, she modeled for pictures but found it dull. Known for being private, she lives in Milan with frescoes on her walls. I came to her work through her fourth book, a slender novel in which, as in the life of its author, a Swiss girl is sent to be educated in a boarding school managed by nuns. The school is in the Appenzell, where the writer Robert Walser died while walking one Christmas Day. Someone had the sense to snap a picture of the body: hat just out of reach, final line of footsteps caught forever in the snow. It is as if, having met his fate on the path, Mr. Walser simply agreed.
When people mention that Jaeggy translated de Quincey, they invariably cite as evidence “The Last Days of Immanuel of Kant.” Has ever a translator—I mean here de Quincey—so eclipsed the one he translates—I mean now Wasianski? Emerson wrote: “Do not go where the path leads, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” How interesting then to go where the path goes and leave a trail nevertheless. For her part, Fleur Jaeggy still lives, so there is nothing yet to say about her death. At times, it feels as though all the stories that need to be written are written and all the lives that need to be lived have been lived.