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