Diary of a Drug Fiend

242 The Diary of a Drug Fiend We have been living so long at such a terrific bat, life is intolerable on any other terms. I don’t feel any physical need of drugs any more. On the contrary, I feel a delightful bodily buoyancy at having got free. It’s an extraordinary thing, too, how normal appetite has returned. We've been eating five meals a day, one feeding like forty instead of Words- worth’s forty feeding like one. We had been starving ourselves for months, and we had to make up for it. The most delicious sensation of all is the re-birth of healthy human love. Spring coming back to the earth ! But it doesn’t satisfy, even so. The intervals between one’s emotions are appallingly long. I think drugs intensify the high lights for one thing ; but for another, and this is really more important, they fit up the inter- stices of shadow. It’s hard, I imagine, in the ordinary way, to come off one’s honeymoon back into regular life. I often wonder how a poet feels when he isn’t absorbed in the ecstasy of inspiration. That may be why so may of them go off the deep end, the interstices bore them. I may as well face the facts. We've had a pretty narrow escape. We've got out of the mess more by good luck than by good judgment. But if it weren't for that, I’m not sure that we shouldn’t be inclined to take another chance. Of course, as things are, it’s quite out of the question. It may be not the least of our luck that the lesson was so severe as it was. October 30 The fact is, we’re too young. We don’t think of the obvious thing. Of course, we’re bored stiff down here with the leaves all fallen, and the mist steaming up from the lake and swamping the house like a gas attack. We ought to be in London, and do the theatres, and look up a few of the old crowd. I ought really to see Maisie Jacobs and tell her how grateful I am. Funny, I can’t think what I have to be grateful about. But luckily it’s in the diary.