Diary of a Drug Fiend

118 The Diary of a Drug Fiend Universe, and is consequently afraid of everything that doesn’t happen to fit its own limits. Lou and I had discarded the miserable measures of mankind. That sort of thing is all right for tailors and men of science; but we had sprung in one leap to be conterminous with the Universe. We were as incommensurable as the ratio of a circle to its diameter. We were as imaginary and unreal from their point of view as the square root of minus one. _ We didn’t ask humanity to judge us. It was simply a case of mistaken identity to regard us as featherless bipeds at all. We may have looked like human beings to their eyes ; in fact, they sent in bills and things as if we had been human beings. But I refuse to be responsible for the mistakes of the inferior animals. I humour them to some extent in their delusions, because they’re lunatics and ought to be humoured. But it’s a long way between that and admitting that their hallucinations have any basis in fact. I had been in their silly world of sense a million years or so ago, when I was Peter Pendragon. But why recall the painful past? Of course, one doesn’t come to one’s full strength in a minute. Take the case of an eagle. What is it as long as it’s in the egg? Nothing but an egg with possibilities. And the first day it’s hatched you don’t expect it to fly to Neptune and back. Certainly not ! But every day, in every way, it gets better and better. And if I was ever tempted to flop and remember my base origin as a forked radish, why all I needed was a kiss from Lou, or a sniff of cocaine to put me back in Paradise. , I can’t tell you about those next twenty-four hours. Suffice it to say that all world’s records were broken and broken again. And we were simply panting like two hungry wolves when Feccles turned up with the disguises and the guns! , He repeated those instructions, and added one word