The Road of Excess by Marcus Boon, Harvard University Press, $29.95/£19.95, ISBN 0674009142 Reviewed by Simon Ings
SOMETIMES the world transcends our physical experiences and expectations. But we have lost the art of how to speak about that experience.
In The Road of Excess: A history of writers on drugs, English professor Marcus Boon suggests that drug-taking became a necessary literary experiment the moment writers found themselves living in a materialist world. When neither church and state nor tree-clad mountainside reflects the face of God, where but in the “negative, transcendental space” of drug experience can writers express the poetry of human smallness and purblindness…
