Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein, 'Everyone dies for himself alone') opens in Berlin in 1940, as the postwoman Eva Kluge delivers to Otto and Anna Quangel the news that their only son has been killed in the invasion of France. The Quangels live in a tenement at 55 Jablonski Strasse with neighbours who represent the range of life under Nazism: the Persickes, a family of brutal Party loyalists; old Frau Rosenthal, a Jewish widow whose flat is looted and who is hounded until she jumps to her death; and retired judge Fromm, who quietly helps where he can.
Medical tag
Addiction
Compulsive dependence on any substance or behaviour (gambling included).
Works
Freud's late essay, in German Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ('the uneasiness in culture'), asks why civilized people, who have built so much for their own protection, are so often unhappy. It is written in eight short chapters in a conversational, self-questioning style.
The Confessions is a prayer in thirteen books addressed to God, in which Augustine recounts his life up to his mother's death and then turns to philosophical reflection on memory, time and the creation narrative of Genesis. Books I to IX are autobiographical.
Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order is set out like Euclid: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, proofs, corollaries and the discursive notes (scholia) where Spinoza speaks most freely. Its five parts lead from God to human blessedness.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
On Liberty asks what limits there are on the power society may legitimately exercise over the individual. Mill opens by observing that the old struggle between subjects and rulers has been transformed by democracy.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
The Anatomy of Melancholy presents itself as a medical treatise, laid out in the scholastic manner of partitions, sections, members and subsections, on 'what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it'. It is also an encyclopedia of Renaissance learning, a compendium of quotation from more than a thousand authors, a satire on human folly, and a consolation for its author and readers.
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
The Nicomachean Ethics asks what the human good is and how a life can be shaped toward it. Aristotle begins from the idea that every craft, inquiry and action aims at some good, and that the highest practical good is eudaimonia, often translated happiness or flourishing.
The Portable Dorothy Parker collects poems, stories, sketches, reviews and occasional pieces that display Parker's distinctive mixture of speed, polish, cruelty and pain. The volume is not a single narrative but a portable career: the brittle lyrics of disappointed love, the dramatic monologues of women waiting for calls or managing humiliation, the social comedies of parties and hotel rooms, the criticism that makes taste sound conversational, and the political pieces that reveal moral seriousness beneath the pose of urban detachment.
The Power and the Glory is set in an unnamed Mexican state during an anticlerical campaign that has outlawed or driven out Catholic priests. Its central figure is the last active priest in the region, a fugitive known as the whisky priest because of his alcoholism and moral failures.
The Principles of Psychology is a two-volume, 1,400-page textbook that William James spent twelve years writing for Henry Holt's American Science Series. It sets out to treat psychology as a natural science of mental life, studying feelings, desires, cognitions and decisions together with their bodily conditions, while refusing to reduce the mind to physiology or to dissolve it into atoms of sensation.
The Quiet American is narrated by Thomas Fowler, a weary British journalist in French-controlled Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The novel begins after the death of Alden Pyle, a young American official whose innocence, confidence and political theories have made him dangerous.
The Republic begins with a question that never stays small: what is justice, and is the just life happier than the unjust? Socrates meets Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Piraeus.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature collects the twenty Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion that William James delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. Instead of studying churches, creeds or theology, James studies personal religious experience as a psychologist, drawing on a large collection of first-person documents: diaries, autobiographies, letters and replies to questionnaires.
Treasure Island is narrated mainly by Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper whose ordinary life is transformed when the old pirate Billy Bones comes to the Admiral Benbow inn. Bones brings a sea chest, a map and danger in the form of former shipmates, including Black Dog and the blind beggar Pew.
Utilitarianism is a short defence of the ethical theory Mill inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his own father. It was first published in three instalments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863.
Passages
- Civilization and Its Discontents, Ch. II
Survey of methods of avoiding suffering: intoxication as the crudest and most effective chemical method, with the danger that it wastes energy; killing the drives as in yoga; sublimation; fantasy; flight into neurosis or psychosis; love; beauty.
- Confessions, Book VI.8
Alypius, dragged to the amphitheatre, opens his eyes and becomes intoxicated by the bloodshed, returning compulsively.
- Confessions, Book VIII.5, 8–12
The chain of habit, the divided will, physical agitation in the garden, and the conversion.
- Confessions, Book IX.8
Monica as a girl falls into a habit of sipping wine from the cellar until rebuked by a servant.
- Ethics, Part IV, Props. XLI–XLIV and Notes
Pleasure and pain evaluated by their bodily effects; mirth always good, melancholy always bad, localized stimulation and love capable of excess; fixed ideas as madness.
- On Liberty, Ch. V, Applications
Drunkenness as self-regarding unless tied to violence; taxation of stimulants; the opium import ban in China and the Maine Law listed as interferences with buyers.
- On the Road, Part Two
Visit to Old Bull Lee's household near New Orleans, where drug use (including Benzedrine and opiates) is part of daily life.
- Pensees, Fragments 139–143, 164–171, Section II
Diversion: gambling, hunting, war and court office as flight from thought; the king without diversion is wretched; death is easier to bear than the thought of it.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part Two, 'Samsara'
Siddhartha's gradual decline into gambling, wine and satiety, ending in self-disgust.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 2, Sect. 4, Memb. 2, Subs. 1
Emetic simples, hellebore and antimony, and the double-edged praise and condemnation of tobacco.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'Dagon'
Narrator's morphine dependence, terror and suicidal resolve after his vision of the sea creature.
- The Koran, Sura 2:219; 5:90–91
Wine and gambling: first described as containing sin and some benefit, later forbidden as works of Satan.
- The Nicomachean Ethics, Book 7
Akrasia examines knowing the better course but acting under appetite or pleasure.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, Big Blonde
Hazel Morse's party persona, drinking, depressive decline and suicide attempt make the story central for alcoholism and gendered despair.
- The Power and the Glory, Village and flight chapters
The priest's craving for alcohol recurs alongside fear, fatigue, hunger and the need to perform sacraments.
- The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapter IV: Habit
Plasticity of nervous tissue, practical maxims for breaking bad habits, and the drunkard who excuses each lapse though his nerve cells register it.
- The Quiet American, Saigon domestic chapters
Fowler's opium use accompanies insomnia, detachment and emotional avoidance in a imperial urban setting.
- The Republic, Book 9
The tyrannical soul is ruled by lawless desires, dreams and compulsions.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures IX and X: Conversion
Sudden and gradual conversion explained through subconscious incubation, with cases of drunkards rescued by religious experience, including S. H. Hadley.
- Treasure Island, Admiral Benbow chapters
Billy Bones's heavy drinking, stroke-like collapse and death bring alcohol, vascular crisis and fear into the opening.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter II (whether happiness is attainable)
Tranquillity and excitement as the two constituents of a satisfied life; the 'need of excitement' as a disease; selfishness and lack of mental cultivation as the main causes of an unsatisfying life; a passing reference to Novalis's recommendation of suicide.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter IV (will, desire and habit)
Will as 'the child of desire' that can come under the dominion of habit; the example of those 'who have contracted habits of vicious or hurtful indulgence' acting against their own deliberate preference.
Quotes
“Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks.”
“Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage”
“But, in reality, Avarice, Ambition, Lust, &c., are species of madness, though they may not be reckoned among diseases”
“Drunkenness, for example, in ordinary cases, is not a fit subject for legislative interference”
Frequently cited
“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber”
“Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases”
“but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul”
“I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more.”
“Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state”
“Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar”
“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature”
“it is only those in whom the need of excitement is a disease, that feel the tranquillity which follows excitement dull and insipid, instead of pleasurable in direct proportion to the excitement which preceded it”
“Will is the child of desire, and passes out of the dominion of its parent only to come under that of habit”