Born on October 22, 1920, in Springfield, Massachusetts, and died on May 31, 1996, Timothy Leary became a major, highly controversial advocate of psychedelic drugs during the 1960s.
Timothy Leary was the only child born into an Irish Catholic household. His father was a dentist who left his mother Abigail Ferris when he was 14. As a young man cursed with too little discipline and too much enthusiasm for women, he bounced around in various universities and military institutions. Eventually, because of his mother's appealing to a family friend, State Senator David I. Walsh, head of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, he found a place to work as a civilian in an army psychological hospital in Pennsylvania during World War II. He then managed to finish his studies in psychology at the University of Alabama via correspondence courses.
In 1941, he was accepted to the University of Alabama through the Reserve Officers' Training Corps but he was expelled a year later for spending the night in the female dormitory. Then Larry remained in the non-commissioned track while enrolled in psychology subsection of the Army Specialized Training Program, including three months of study at Georgetown University, and six months at Ohio State University.
Georgetown University is a private research unit and the oldest Catholic and Jesuit-affiliated institution of higher education in the United States. The university has always been governed independently of the church. Founded in 1789, the program has grown to comprise 9 undergraduate and graduate schools, among which are the School of Foreign Service, School of Business, Medical School and Law School. Its main campus is located on a hill above the Potomac River, the 4th largest River along the Atlantic coast and form the borders between Maryland and Washington D.C. Notable alumni include Bill Clinton, Antonin Scalia (Supreme Court Justice), George Tenet (CIA director, and King Felipe of Spain, as well as the royalty and heads of state of more than a dozen countries.
Ohio University is a large, primarily residential, public university, founded in 1870 as a land-grant meaning a federal controlled land to focus on the teaching of practical agriculture, science, military science and engineering.
Leary received an M.S. in psychology at Washington State University, a public research university, through the Reserve Officers' Training Corps.
In 1950, he received a Ph.D in clinical psychology from Berkeley. At this point of his life he started to belief that the only route to true psychological cure lay in the authentic insight into the nature of one's self.
By this time Leary stayed in the Bay Area as an assistant clinical professor at UCLA, San Francisco;
concurrently he co-founded Kaiser Hospital's psychology department in Oakland, California and maintained a private consultancy. In 1952, the family spent a year in Spain, subsisting on a research grant. He was at the starting point of constructing the conventional middle-class life.
Despite his nascent professional success, his marriage was strained by multiple infidelities and mutual alcohol abuse. Then everything shattered in a million pieces on his 35th birthday, in October, 1955, when Marianna, his first wife, decided to kill herself on the morning of that specific day by starting the family car, shutting the redwood garage door and inhaling the exhaust. When Leary woke up on that Saturday morning with a hangover he discovered his wife dead. The couple's two children -Susan 8, and Jack 6 panicked as they saw their father shouting for help, but there was nothing there that anyone could do. In the aftermath, he took his children and left for Spain again. After spending a few years in Europe he developed a new version of him with a wild and an exciting character.
On a vacation in Mexico he was offered the chance to try one of the magical mushrooms that had recently being discussed in an article in Life magazine. He told to his friend, the novelist Arthur Koestler, that he had learned more in those 6 hours of interaction with the mushrooms than in the previous 16 years of his life. Leary now felt that he had found a way to bring the insight he experienced to his close patients as well as to his circle of friends. He went to Harvard in 1959 not to join the academic club, but to challenge it. In that sense, he seemed the perfect man to conduct psychedelic drug experiments at Harvard's Center for Personality Research. As a clinical psychologist he conducted his experiments under the Harvard Psilocybin Project in 1960-62, resulting in the Concord Prison experiment and the Marsh Chapel experiment.
When the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz made lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) available in the late 1940s, researchers were encouraged to try it themselves to better understand madness. Later Leary began his research with a milder Sandoz product, synthetic psilocybin, and started to distribute it to fellow faculty members, divinity students and even prisoners, and everyone he could find who might be interested in trying it, including students in the undergraduate program, all with their consent. Although still technically legal in the late 1950s and early 1960s, giving LSD to students of any kind was considered extremely unethical. Things got out of hand. By 1963, Harvard was a hotbed of indiscriminate acid use. Larry and his colleague, Richard Alpert, a so called spiritualist, were fired from Harvard in the same year. They both used LSD to develop a philosophy of mind expansion and personal growing using the chemical reaction of the drug to block some areas of the brain and induced themselves in a strong persuasion in their minds that they found the path for spiritual enlightenment when they really got the enhancement of the pleasures of the flesh.
The chemical involved in the LSD was simply unpredictable. it produced hallucinations and paranoia, yet also proved to be helpful in controlled therapy, relaxing patients and sweeping away neuroses and even cure chronic alcoholism. Business executives and various luminaries began boasting of taking the LSD cure.
By this time, the cultural revolutions of the time were in full swing and Leary was becoming one of the principle intellectual gurus of the hippie movement. He was an audacious risk-taker. Briefly he ran for Governor of California against Ronald Reagan. John Lennon wrote the song, "Come Together" to be Leary's political theme song that says: "I know you. You know me. One thing I can tell you is you got to be free." Leary's campaign was abandoned when he was convicted of possession of marijuana and sent to prison. During the 1960s and the 1970s, Leary was arrested often enough to see the inside of 36 prisons worldwide. He later escaped using his political connections.
Until then, Leary had been seen standing up in front of thousands at anti-war protesters, telling them :
"Turn yourself on, take LSD, tune yourself in, get the message, and drop out, leave your normal life behind." This was, after all, exactly what he had done. He became a crusader in the aim to turn the world on to LSD, a chemical compound derived from a fungus that grows on rye.
In 1966, as the Federal Government moved to ban LSD, Leary testified in the Senate that LSD was dangerous if used improperly -just like alcohol. When they outlawed it, Leary lashed back and wrote in his book "High Priest" in 1967, "They are right. It is as it should be."
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
Sunday, October 28, 2018
THE LIFE OF ALDOUS HUXLEY.
From this influential Huxley British family, several members have excelled in science, medicine, arts, and literature. The family also includes members who occupied senior positions in the public service of the United Kingdom.
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) was a biologist known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his defense of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Mostly a self-educated man, he had an extraordinary influence on the British educated public. He was instrumental in developing scientific education and opposed those Christian leaders who tried to stifle scientific debate. A noted unbeliever, he used the term "agnostic" to describe his attitude to theism.
Aldous Huxley (July26, 1894-November22, 1963) was a prominent member of the Huxley family and the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley. He was the son of a schoolmaster and writer, Leonard Huxley and his mother was Julia Arnold, niece of poet and critic Matthew Arnold and sister of Mrs Humphry Ward, a known writer. He was instructed by his own mother until she became terminally ill. His mother died when he was 14, in 1908. In 1911 Aldous contracted the eye disease (keratitis punctata) which left him practically blind for 3 years. In January 1916, he volunteered for the British Army in the World War I, however was rejected on health grounds, being half-blind in one eye. During the War he spent much of his time at Garsington Manor near Oxford, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a society hostess, working as a farm laborer. There he met several Bloomsbury figures, including Bertrand Russel Alfred North Whitehead, and Clive Bell. He caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. At the time when jobs were very scarce, John Middleton Murry was reorganizing the literary magazine, The Athenaeum, and invited Huxley to join the staff. He accepted quickly and quickly married the Belgium refugee Maria Nys, also at Garsington.
Huxley used this time of his life to write as much as he could and became the author of nearly 50 books, He became best known for his novel Brave New World that shows the influence of drugs. The citizens of the future are nearly all hoped up on Soma, a powerful hallucinogen that allows "a holiday" from reality, imparts a tremendous feeling of well-being, softens up the mind and poisons the body. In the climactic scene in the book, when the character John the Savage rebels against the Fordist Society, his anger is concentrated on Soma, which has come to symbolize all that is rotten in this future-state.
Back in the 1930s, Huxley even described mescaline as a worse poison than Soma, rendering the poor character Linda as vomitous and even dumber than usual. And for nonfiction works The Doors of Perception recalls his experiences taking drugs whose primary action was to trigger experiences that altered the state of consciousness. He thought that he was expanding the fences of awareness momentarily like the opening aperture of a camera lens.
On Christmas Eve 1955, he took his first dose of LSD, an experience he was to repeat often and he claimed allowed him to plumb even greater depths than mescaline. Huxley's experimentation continued right through his death bed, when he asked his wife to inject him with multiple doses of uncut LSD. He died later that day, just hours after Kennedy's assassination. Three years later, LSD was officially banned in California.
In the late stage of his life before he died, Huxley became interested in paranormal and psychic phenomena, including telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, reincarnation, and apparitional experiences. Also he became an universalist, a concept that emphasizes the universal principles of most religions and centered around the belief in an universal reconciliation between humanity and the divine.
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) was a biologist known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his defense of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Mostly a self-educated man, he had an extraordinary influence on the British educated public. He was instrumental in developing scientific education and opposed those Christian leaders who tried to stifle scientific debate. A noted unbeliever, he used the term "agnostic" to describe his attitude to theism.
Aldous Huxley (July26, 1894-November22, 1963) was a prominent member of the Huxley family and the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley. He was the son of a schoolmaster and writer, Leonard Huxley and his mother was Julia Arnold, niece of poet and critic Matthew Arnold and sister of Mrs Humphry Ward, a known writer. He was instructed by his own mother until she became terminally ill. His mother died when he was 14, in 1908. In 1911 Aldous contracted the eye disease (keratitis punctata) which left him practically blind for 3 years. In January 1916, he volunteered for the British Army in the World War I, however was rejected on health grounds, being half-blind in one eye. During the War he spent much of his time at Garsington Manor near Oxford, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, a society hostess, working as a farm laborer. There he met several Bloomsbury figures, including Bertrand Russel Alfred North Whitehead, and Clive Bell. He caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. At the time when jobs were very scarce, John Middleton Murry was reorganizing the literary magazine, The Athenaeum, and invited Huxley to join the staff. He accepted quickly and quickly married the Belgium refugee Maria Nys, also at Garsington.
Huxley used this time of his life to write as much as he could and became the author of nearly 50 books, He became best known for his novel Brave New World that shows the influence of drugs. The citizens of the future are nearly all hoped up on Soma, a powerful hallucinogen that allows "a holiday" from reality, imparts a tremendous feeling of well-being, softens up the mind and poisons the body. In the climactic scene in the book, when the character John the Savage rebels against the Fordist Society, his anger is concentrated on Soma, which has come to symbolize all that is rotten in this future-state.
Back in the 1930s, Huxley even described mescaline as a worse poison than Soma, rendering the poor character Linda as vomitous and even dumber than usual. And for nonfiction works The Doors of Perception recalls his experiences taking drugs whose primary action was to trigger experiences that altered the state of consciousness. He thought that he was expanding the fences of awareness momentarily like the opening aperture of a camera lens.
On Christmas Eve 1955, he took his first dose of LSD, an experience he was to repeat often and he claimed allowed him to plumb even greater depths than mescaline. Huxley's experimentation continued right through his death bed, when he asked his wife to inject him with multiple doses of uncut LSD. He died later that day, just hours after Kennedy's assassination. Three years later, LSD was officially banned in California.
In the late stage of his life before he died, Huxley became interested in paranormal and psychic phenomena, including telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, reincarnation, and apparitional experiences. Also he became an universalist, a concept that emphasizes the universal principles of most religions and centered around the belief in an universal reconciliation between humanity and the divine.
Sunday, July 1, 2018
PEISIS'TRATUS, THE TYRANT.
Peisis'Tratus, also spelled Pisis'Tratus, (born 6th BC-died 527BC), a cruel and oppressive ruler who seized power unconstitutionally over ancient Athens, the birthplace of Western civilization. Athens lies 8km/5mi from the Bay of Phaleron, an inlet of the Aegean Sea where the port of Athens is situated, in a mountain-girt arid basin divided North-South by a line of hills. The Kifi'Sos River, only a trickle in summer, flows through the Western half; the Ili'Sos River, often dry, traverses the Eastern half. Mountains that surround the area add the impression of barrenness. Yet, when compared with the fecundity of Athen's bequests to the world, such as its philosophy, its architecture, its literature, and its political ideals, that impression becomes superficial.
In 594BC Peisis'Tratus' mother's relative, the reformer Solon, had improved the economic position of the Athenian lower classes, but it did not eliminate bitter aristocratic contentions for control the chief executive post (archonship). Lycurgus, the lawgiver who founded most of the institutions of ancient Sparta, controlled the Plain, one of the two major political factions, and Megacles, grandson of the Megacles who directed the slaughter of Cylon and his supporters on the Acropolis (612BC), was the leader of the other faction who controlled the Coast. Peisis'Tratus organized his own faction, named the Hills'Men, a group that included noble families from his own district, the Eastern part of Attica, and also a very considerable part of the growing population of the city of Athens.
During a war with the city of Megara (565BC), Peisis'Tratus gained military fame by taking the harbor. At one point he slashed himself and the mules of his chariot and made a dramatic entrance into the agora (marketplace) to show how 'his enemies' had wounded him. The people voted in favor of him and let him use a bodyguard of citizens armed with clubs, which aided him to seize the Acropolis and held power briefly (560-559BC). Megara, an ancient settlement on the Sar'On'Ikos Gulf within Attica, that sat on the Southern slopes of two hills that served as citadels (acropolises), had commercial colonies that were established on Sicily. Megara colonized Northward and Eastward on the Bosporus River and Sea of Marmara at Chaledon and Byzantium.
To increase the popular support of his power he contracted a short-lived marriage with the daughter of Megacles, the political leader who controlled the Coast, and again acquired temporal power in Athens (556-555BC). Lycurgus and Megacles united their powers to force him out. Peisis'Tratus became an exile in Northern Greece for several years, exploiting the silver and gold mines on Mt. Pang'Aeum and gaining the support of the conservatives in Thebes, Argos, Naxos, and elsewhere. He laid a solid base for his return.
In 546BC Peisis'Tratus went to Eretria on the Island of Euboea, the largest island in Greece, after Crete, in the Aegean Sea, with a force founded by his own funds and by his friends in high circles, and from this base invaded Attica. At Pallene, near Mt. Hymettus, he launched a surprise attack on the Athenian army in the heat of midday, while his enemies were gambling or sleeping. After a complete victory, he became master of Athens for the 3rd time and remained in power until his death in 527BC.
In 594BC Peisis'Tratus' mother's relative, the reformer Solon, had improved the economic position of the Athenian lower classes, but it did not eliminate bitter aristocratic contentions for control the chief executive post (archonship). Lycurgus, the lawgiver who founded most of the institutions of ancient Sparta, controlled the Plain, one of the two major political factions, and Megacles, grandson of the Megacles who directed the slaughter of Cylon and his supporters on the Acropolis (612BC), was the leader of the other faction who controlled the Coast. Peisis'Tratus organized his own faction, named the Hills'Men, a group that included noble families from his own district, the Eastern part of Attica, and also a very considerable part of the growing population of the city of Athens.
During a war with the city of Megara (565BC), Peisis'Tratus gained military fame by taking the harbor. At one point he slashed himself and the mules of his chariot and made a dramatic entrance into the agora (marketplace) to show how 'his enemies' had wounded him. The people voted in favor of him and let him use a bodyguard of citizens armed with clubs, which aided him to seize the Acropolis and held power briefly (560-559BC). Megara, an ancient settlement on the Sar'On'Ikos Gulf within Attica, that sat on the Southern slopes of two hills that served as citadels (acropolises), had commercial colonies that were established on Sicily. Megara colonized Northward and Eastward on the Bosporus River and Sea of Marmara at Chaledon and Byzantium.
To increase the popular support of his power he contracted a short-lived marriage with the daughter of Megacles, the political leader who controlled the Coast, and again acquired temporal power in Athens (556-555BC). Lycurgus and Megacles united their powers to force him out. Peisis'Tratus became an exile in Northern Greece for several years, exploiting the silver and gold mines on Mt. Pang'Aeum and gaining the support of the conservatives in Thebes, Argos, Naxos, and elsewhere. He laid a solid base for his return.
In 546BC Peisis'Tratus went to Eretria on the Island of Euboea, the largest island in Greece, after Crete, in the Aegean Sea, with a force founded by his own funds and by his friends in high circles, and from this base invaded Attica. At Pallene, near Mt. Hymettus, he launched a surprise attack on the Athenian army in the heat of midday, while his enemies were gambling or sleeping. After a complete victory, he became master of Athens for the 3rd time and remained in power until his death in 527BC.
Saturday, June 30, 2018
GERARD DE NERVAL.
Gerard La'Brunie was born in Paris on May 22, 1808. His father, Etienne La'Bruine, was a young doctor who had volunteered to serve as a medic in the army under Napoleon, his mother, Marie Marguerite Antoinette Laurent, was the daughter of a clothing salesman.
In June 1808, soon after Gerard was born, Etienne was drafted. While they traveled East, the parents left their newborn son in the care of the mother's uncle Antoine Boucher. On November 29, 1810 the mother died before she could come back to France. Gerard was 2 years old. The father was reunited with his son in 1814, in Paris. The boy lived with his father but often stayed with the mother's uncle in Morte'Fontaine and with Gerard Dublanc, his father's uncle, and Gerard's godfather, in Saint Germain-en-Laye, West of Paris.
In 1822, at the age of 14, Gerard enrolled at the Lycee Charlemagne. Here he met and befriended Pierre Jules Theophile Gautier, a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist and art and literary critic.
This was also where he began to take poetry more seriously. He was specially drawn to epic poetry.
At the age of 16, he wrote a poem that recounted the circumstances of Napoleon's defeat. Later, he tried out satire, writing poems that took aim at Prime Minister Villele, leader of the Ultra-royalist faction during the Bourbon Restoration; the Jesuit Order; and anti-liberal newspapers. His writings started to be published in 1826.
At the age of 19, with minimal knowledge of the German language, he began the ambitious task of translating Goethe's Faust, a tragic play in two parts. Part One takes place in multiple settings, the first of which is heaven. A demon makes a bet with God by saying that he can lure God's favorite human being, who is striving to learn everything that can be known, away from righteous pursuits. In Faust's study room, he turns to magic for the showering of infinite knowledge, despairing at the vanity of scientific, humanitarian and religious learning. He feels that his attempts are failing. Frustrated, he ponders suicide, but rejects the idea as he hears the echo of nearby Easter celebration. He goes for a walk with his assistant and is followed by a dog similar to a sheep dog. In his studio, the dog transforms into the demon. Faust makes an arrangement with the demon in which it will do everything that he wants while he is here on Earth and in exchange he will serve the devil in hell. Faust's arrangement is that if he is pleased enough with anything the demon gives him that he wants to stay in that moment forever, then he will die in that moment. When the demon tells Faust to sign the pact with blood, Faust complains that the demon does not trust Faust's word of horror. In the end, the demons wins the argument and Faust signs the contract with a drop of his own blood. Then he meets a woman that was attracted to him, and the demon draws her into Faust's arms. With the demon's aid he seduces her and her mother dies from a sleeping potion, administered by her daughter to obtain privacy so that he can visit her. She becomes pregnant. Her brother condemns Faust, challenges him and fall dead at the hands of Faust and the demon. The woman drowns her illegitimate child and is convicted of murder. Faust tries to save her from death by attempting to free her from prison. Finding that she refuses to do so, he and the demon flee the dungeon. Faust remains unsatisfied.
In part two Faust wakes in a field of fairies and initiate a new cycle of adventures and purpose. The first part represents the small world and the second part represents the wider world or macrocosm. Faust goes to heaven, for he loses only half of the bet. Angels declare at the end: "He who strives on and lives to strive can still earn redemption."
Gerard's prose translation appeared in 1828, doing a great deal to establish his poetic reputation. It is the reason why Victor Hugo, the leader of the Romantic movement in France, felt compelled to have him as a guest in his apartment. Victor Hugo asked him to support his play Hernani, under attack from conservative critics, he was more than happy to join the fight.
The French Revolution of 1830, however, was an event that didn't caught his attention. Instead, he set himself into two projects: German and French poetry. Alexandre Dumas and Pierre-Sebastien Laurentie arranged a library card for him so he could carry out his research.
Gerard, following Hugo's lead, started to write plays and used the pseudonym Gerard de Nerval, inspired by the name of a property that belonged to his family.
In January 1834, Nerval's maternal grandfather died and he inherited around 30,000 francs. In May of that year, he created Le Monde Dramatique, a luxurious literary journal that made him squander his inheritance. Debt-ridden, he finally sold it in 1836.
In 1837, Gerard worked inthe project 'Piquillo,' but Dumas was the only name on the libretto. Nerval may have fallen in love with the actress. His unrequited love for her is what inspired many of the female figures that appeared in his writing. In the summer of 1838, he traveled with Dumas to Germany to work on another project 'Leo Burckart' which was eventually premiered on April 16, 1839, six days after the premiere of another play the pair worked on together 'L'Alchimiste.
In November 1839, Nerval travelled to Vienna, where he met the pianist Marie Pleyel. Back in France in March 1840, Nerval took over Gautier's column at La Presse. After publishing a 3rd edition of Faust in July, he travelled to Belgium in October. On December 15, 'Piquillo' premiered in Brussels, where Nerval crossed paths with the actress and the pianist once again.
After his 1st nervous breakdown on February 23, 1841 he was cared for at the Sainte-Colombe Borstal (maison de correction). After a 2nd nervous breakdown, Nerval was housed in Docteur Esprit Blanche, a clinic in Mont'Martre, where he remained for 8 months.
On December 22, 1842 he set off for the Near East, traveling to Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, Malta, Naples and Constantinopla. Back in Paris in 1843, Nerval started to publish articles about his trip.
Between 1844 and 1847, he traveled to Belgium, the Netherlands, to London, producing a significant amount of travel writing. At the same time, he wrote novellas and opera librettos and translated poems by his friend Heinrich Heine, publishing a selection of translations in 1848.
Gerard's last years were spent in dire financial and emotional straits. Following his doctor's advice, he tried to purge himself of his intense emotions in his writings. This is when he composed some of his best works.
Nerval was said to have taken his pet lobster for a walk in the gardens of the Palais-Royal in Paris one day, using a blue ribbon for a leash. He said, 'Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog? or cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they do not bark, and they do not gnaw upon one's privacy like dogs do. And Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he was not mad.
On January 26, 1855, during the night time, he committed suicide at the age of 46, by hanging himself from the bar of a cellar window in the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, a narrow line in a squalid section of Paris. He left a brief note to his aunt: "Do not wait up for me this evening, for the night will be black and white."
Gerard died in the darkest street that he could find.
In June 1808, soon after Gerard was born, Etienne was drafted. While they traveled East, the parents left their newborn son in the care of the mother's uncle Antoine Boucher. On November 29, 1810 the mother died before she could come back to France. Gerard was 2 years old. The father was reunited with his son in 1814, in Paris. The boy lived with his father but often stayed with the mother's uncle in Morte'Fontaine and with Gerard Dublanc, his father's uncle, and Gerard's godfather, in Saint Germain-en-Laye, West of Paris.
In 1822, at the age of 14, Gerard enrolled at the Lycee Charlemagne. Here he met and befriended Pierre Jules Theophile Gautier, a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist and art and literary critic.
This was also where he began to take poetry more seriously. He was specially drawn to epic poetry.
At the age of 16, he wrote a poem that recounted the circumstances of Napoleon's defeat. Later, he tried out satire, writing poems that took aim at Prime Minister Villele, leader of the Ultra-royalist faction during the Bourbon Restoration; the Jesuit Order; and anti-liberal newspapers. His writings started to be published in 1826.
At the age of 19, with minimal knowledge of the German language, he began the ambitious task of translating Goethe's Faust, a tragic play in two parts. Part One takes place in multiple settings, the first of which is heaven. A demon makes a bet with God by saying that he can lure God's favorite human being, who is striving to learn everything that can be known, away from righteous pursuits. In Faust's study room, he turns to magic for the showering of infinite knowledge, despairing at the vanity of scientific, humanitarian and religious learning. He feels that his attempts are failing. Frustrated, he ponders suicide, but rejects the idea as he hears the echo of nearby Easter celebration. He goes for a walk with his assistant and is followed by a dog similar to a sheep dog. In his studio, the dog transforms into the demon. Faust makes an arrangement with the demon in which it will do everything that he wants while he is here on Earth and in exchange he will serve the devil in hell. Faust's arrangement is that if he is pleased enough with anything the demon gives him that he wants to stay in that moment forever, then he will die in that moment. When the demon tells Faust to sign the pact with blood, Faust complains that the demon does not trust Faust's word of horror. In the end, the demons wins the argument and Faust signs the contract with a drop of his own blood. Then he meets a woman that was attracted to him, and the demon draws her into Faust's arms. With the demon's aid he seduces her and her mother dies from a sleeping potion, administered by her daughter to obtain privacy so that he can visit her. She becomes pregnant. Her brother condemns Faust, challenges him and fall dead at the hands of Faust and the demon. The woman drowns her illegitimate child and is convicted of murder. Faust tries to save her from death by attempting to free her from prison. Finding that she refuses to do so, he and the demon flee the dungeon. Faust remains unsatisfied.
In part two Faust wakes in a field of fairies and initiate a new cycle of adventures and purpose. The first part represents the small world and the second part represents the wider world or macrocosm. Faust goes to heaven, for he loses only half of the bet. Angels declare at the end: "He who strives on and lives to strive can still earn redemption."
Gerard's prose translation appeared in 1828, doing a great deal to establish his poetic reputation. It is the reason why Victor Hugo, the leader of the Romantic movement in France, felt compelled to have him as a guest in his apartment. Victor Hugo asked him to support his play Hernani, under attack from conservative critics, he was more than happy to join the fight.
The French Revolution of 1830, however, was an event that didn't caught his attention. Instead, he set himself into two projects: German and French poetry. Alexandre Dumas and Pierre-Sebastien Laurentie arranged a library card for him so he could carry out his research.
Gerard, following Hugo's lead, started to write plays and used the pseudonym Gerard de Nerval, inspired by the name of a property that belonged to his family.
In January 1834, Nerval's maternal grandfather died and he inherited around 30,000 francs. In May of that year, he created Le Monde Dramatique, a luxurious literary journal that made him squander his inheritance. Debt-ridden, he finally sold it in 1836.
In 1837, Gerard worked inthe project 'Piquillo,' but Dumas was the only name on the libretto. Nerval may have fallen in love with the actress. His unrequited love for her is what inspired many of the female figures that appeared in his writing. In the summer of 1838, he traveled with Dumas to Germany to work on another project 'Leo Burckart' which was eventually premiered on April 16, 1839, six days after the premiere of another play the pair worked on together 'L'Alchimiste.
In November 1839, Nerval travelled to Vienna, where he met the pianist Marie Pleyel. Back in France in March 1840, Nerval took over Gautier's column at La Presse. After publishing a 3rd edition of Faust in July, he travelled to Belgium in October. On December 15, 'Piquillo' premiered in Brussels, where Nerval crossed paths with the actress and the pianist once again.
After his 1st nervous breakdown on February 23, 1841 he was cared for at the Sainte-Colombe Borstal (maison de correction). After a 2nd nervous breakdown, Nerval was housed in Docteur Esprit Blanche, a clinic in Mont'Martre, where he remained for 8 months.
On December 22, 1842 he set off for the Near East, traveling to Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, Malta, Naples and Constantinopla. Back in Paris in 1843, Nerval started to publish articles about his trip.
Between 1844 and 1847, he traveled to Belgium, the Netherlands, to London, producing a significant amount of travel writing. At the same time, he wrote novellas and opera librettos and translated poems by his friend Heinrich Heine, publishing a selection of translations in 1848.
Gerard's last years were spent in dire financial and emotional straits. Following his doctor's advice, he tried to purge himself of his intense emotions in his writings. This is when he composed some of his best works.
Nerval was said to have taken his pet lobster for a walk in the gardens of the Palais-Royal in Paris one day, using a blue ribbon for a leash. He said, 'Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog? or cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they do not bark, and they do not gnaw upon one's privacy like dogs do. And Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he was not mad.
On January 26, 1855, during the night time, he committed suicide at the age of 46, by hanging himself from the bar of a cellar window in the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, a narrow line in a squalid section of Paris. He left a brief note to his aunt: "Do not wait up for me this evening, for the night will be black and white."
Gerard died in the darkest street that he could find.
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