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The following text was ‘written’ using sentiment analysis algorithms. The content was extracted and re-ordered from a selection of texts written between 1837 and 2013. This automated process followed different polarity values of negative and positive sentiments ranging between -0.20 to +0.22. These values are based on the ‘Subjectivity Lexicon for English Adjective’ developed by the ‘CLiPS Computational Linguistics Group’ at the University of Antwerp. The source texts are listed on pages 111-113. What binds all the source texts is opium.
Dissolving, Mixing, Melting, Stirring
It has been forty days, or forty months, that I have had no tea to drink, and nothing else whatsoever, naturally, and how many years since I last slept? It is beyond dispute that the large quantities of the poison which then reached the cells of my immature body created an appetite which though dormant for twenty years asserted a mastery when my limbs and wilt were fettered by disease and the drug was again introduced. Today it is simply called yan, smoke, or dayan, the great smoke, or wuyan, the black smoke, or else it is called yangyan, Western-sea smoke. So all I can put down is that we had a complete success. There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. Following the prescription of his profession my attendant physician administered morphine hypodermically without consulting my wishes in the premises and without apprising me of the fact. There was an overdose—my physician was worn out with horror and exertion—and I travelled very far indeed. The eighteenth century was a period when knowledge about opium was passed on to many people (in other words, accumulated and socialised).
Many people come to see me, and that I like, better than you would think: there are always so many absurd stories told about smokers! In crock, however, its presence occupies us intensely. This goes so far that, with a feeling of profound well-being, we playfully draw on those experiences of ornament which marked themselves out to us in the years of childhood and in times of fever.
The introduction of opium as a luxury item was intimately connected to China’s maritime trade and to Chinese diplomacy. An elegant foreign clock stands on a marble table behind him. In the evening, at an hour when Europeans are dozing at the club or carrying on flirtations in the drawing-rooms, I pretend to go home, with a very blasé air so far as fashionable life is concerned. The degree of care and fidelity, with which the whole work was conducted, far exceeded our expectations; and I cannot conceive how any business could be more faithfully executed. He lies, dressed, across a large unseemly bed, upon a bedstead that has indeed given way under the weight upon it. He remembered that 'the natives of all those countries are very fond of it (opium), smoking it together with their tobacco, or chewing it unmixed.’
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